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WANTED: NEW MBAs, NEW ENTREPRENEURS, NEW ECONOMISTS

A new economy is coming because the present system is under far too much strain. Eventually, debt will be too high, business activity and employment too low, and taxes beyond belief, then we will have make a decisive move to something brand new.

Capitalism is not likely to thrive again, socialism and state ownership are out of the question, so we are left only with the third economic option: A Diverse Economy, and it is coming in some form.

New kinds of MBAs, economists, entrepreneurs, CEOs, financiers will be needed. These will be people who think in very different terms:

Living in a Metric Diverse

The new business person thinks in terms of metrics, not just money or profit or standard financial measures, but a whole new world of metrics. This metric Diverse includes: product quality, customer relations, participating and giving to a local community, environmental standards, equity and compensation for a workforce, raising product standards and increasing innovation, working for diversity in a workforce, and much, much more.

The new business person looks at ALL of the metrics for she or he is trying to meet all goals and serve all human needs. We have a diversity of human goals -- the metrics represent them. We do not just focus on one or a few to the neglect of the needs of others.

Further, funding for companies will be based upon metric performance and consumers will be buying based on that performance, and local communities will be either supporting or opposing firms based on this performance. Feedback would reinforce behavior. So metrics would be the fundamental driver and the sacrosanct.

The new MBA is a Metrician of Business Administration. The new economist works toward the health of the overall metric economy. The new entrepreneur starts new businesses right from the beginning with the new metric principles, she or he is an innovator and pathfinder.

Working with Democracy and Equity

Often, the new business person works in an environment of cooperatives and democratic corporations. Managers, professionals, executives are not above the workforce or investors. Direct democracy is the rule in a metric economy. Leaders will work in groups and learn to manage competing opinions and forge majority agreements. Also very importantly new leaders will need to learn the art of “Social Creativity”, the skill of marshaling the creative efforts of many individuals toward a collective goal.

In the case of small business people where singular ownership is the norm, new economic leaders can aid in developing simple, workable measure systems, they can help develop associations or coops or franchise arrangements that help an ethical business owner fulfill a desire to go the path of metric valuation.

On the Path of the Middle Way

The new business person serves people and is not seduced by wealth and does not equate wealth with helping others, that is, the act of getting rich automatically helps other people.

She or he can handle resources, personal, money, organization, inventories of equipment and materials and NOT become corrupt, power hungry, selfish as is the norm in conventional business. The modern CEO is the personification of greed and avarice. The new business person is the personification of the new metric codex.

Compensation is not excessive; it is tied to metric performance of the firm, not simply monetary performance.

The new business manager goes down the “Middle Way” between two archetypes. On one side is the Mendicant, the ascetic who lives a pure life, free of material and monetary possessions or needs. On the other side is the business person who lives in a world surrounded by wealth and all of its temptations.

Down the Middle Way is the path of managing money, resources and personnel to serve people. The new business person serves the company’s investors, employees and clients. The new business person serves the community where the company is located, and attempts to serve the whole nation in constantly upgrading standards, and further is concerned about the well being of the entire planet.

Building Social Wealth

At one time nations thought that wealth was bullion, amassing great hordes of gold; later people thought that wealth was money, amassing great piles of money from a monetary capitalist economy. Today, we define wealth differently; "metric wealth" is old wealth plus new metrics. Metric wealth is more that quantities of money; it includes qualities of many other types. And metric wealth may at times mean a decrease in quantities of goods and profit in certain spheres for the overall public good, as we evolve and learn. Metric wealth increases the quality of life and does not obsess with the quantities of profit; in its view quantity will follow from quality.

A new business person helps to build up the national wealth of a nation and does not see business competition as a subtractive process where the destruction of one is the survival of another. New metrics create a condition that continually drives up standards of the entire industrial community, and this serves everyone – consumer, investor, community and nation and eventually the whole planet.

Seeking Material Wisdom

The new wealth created by a metric economy is wiser; in the past, economics and wisdom were separated by a large gap. But when we grasp that economics is essentially a realm of measure, a specific kind of sociology of measure, then our wisdoms can now be produced and measured, and economics can now break through to the intangible and ideal, wisdom becomes a physical system.

And with this kind of wisdom we can avoid the catastrophes of today.

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