Ecosystems:

The Future Of Business and Society

Founding a design firm and community:

To be the premier designer, developer, management and governance of strategic 

civic ecosystems as a business model.

This paper serves as a brief introduction to the core concepts behind this business venture.

The SmartSwarms Business Design & Development System is a result of over twenty years of study and research into an ecosystem approach to the organization and distribution of resources in a networked economy. The SmartSwarms System uses the collective, collaborative intelligence of a strategic stakeholder community in a continuous design process for the development of products and services. Beginning with a focus on the city's transportation systems. This represents a transformational shift in economics, the relationship between business and society, and the citizen's role in the design and development of their city's critical digitally enhanced infrastructure.

This paper is intended for those with a keen interest with the SmartSwarms Business Design & Development model as the design firm for the future of urban mobility as a career, and/or as a prime community member. This is for people who want to shape the future and make history.

Ecosystems

Economic Ecosystems are an evolutionary advance in how we think about business, society, and its relationship with the citizen consumer. Here are three recent papers from highly renowned institutions that signify the relevance of this shift.

Here's what the London Business School Review has to say about ecosystems:

Ecosystems are not a fad or a sexy buzzword. They reflect a true paradigm shift in business. They are a genuinely new organisational form: fluid networks of organisations combining to deliver bundles of products and services in new and unfamiliar ways. And just like the step from single- to multi-cell organisms in nature, they represent a profound evolutionary shift.

This, from the World Economic Forum:

Platforms and ecosystems represent a new way of organizing that can yield significant benefits for society. New products and services create citizen value, while new operating models achieve public objectives, from urban regeneration to the development of clean mobility to healthcare improvements. Most saliently, digital ecosystems have the ability to help redefine the boundaries between the public and private spheres, creating new models of “invisible infrastructure” while allowing entrepreneurs to provide the “scaffolding” for new products and services. The true potential of such collaboration will be realized if the technological, operating and regulatory innovations proceed in lockstep, rather than in isolation.

--Platforms and Ecosystems: Enabling the Digital Economy

Lastly, from McKinsey&Co

We describe the coming transformation as mobility’s Second Great Inflection Point, because it has the potential to be as profound as the one that put horses to pasture and revolutionized industries and societies worldwide. A defining characteristic of the new world taking shape is that the automotive industry, which has operated for more than a century alongside but decidedly disconnected from other components of what transportation has come to mean, will blend into a more interconnected, customer-centric ecosystem. That shift boosts the odds that the momentous changes afoot will affect your business, even if the closest you currently get to a car is your morning commute.

Reimagining the mobility ecosystem: A CEO`s Guide. --McKinsey Insights

Unprecedented Opportunity

No matter where you are in your career, moving into the growing field of ecosystem design and management is the smart move.  This is the future of business and society, and our intention is the be the global leader in the design and development, and the management and governance of social-business ecosystems. For highly ambitious people, who want to make a real difference in this world, you will find few better opportunities than this one. This is so much more than any start-up you have ever heard of, this is about shaping the future of cities at a systematic level. This is changing the course of history!

We are going to be the world's premier Design, Development, Management and Governance firm for urban mobility ecosystems.

It Starts With Community

At the heart of this model is community. For a mobility ecosystem, this means a community comprised of members from the relevant private sector, members from the public sector, and members from civic society, what will come to be known as the Three Legged Stakeholder Model.

As technology continues to evolve, conversely, it is no longer considered a differentiator. Relationships are now the foundation of business. This is particularly important when designing the future of our transportation systems, and essentially so when it comes to data privacy and data ownership.

Relatedly, when it comes to the design and development of Artificial Intelligence, a user based community is critical.

With a strong multi-stakeholder community, anything is possible!

Community as the Foundation for a User Based Approach to Designing Our Transportation Ecosystem.

One of the earliest characteristics of the internet and networks, was this allowed for a very different relationship between people and information. This enables a radically different approach to the design and development of services, and correspondingly, radical new business models. This is not a matter of choice. If we are going to reach the potential of digital transformation, this will require radical new business models, and organizational designs and structures, in conjunction with culture.

This approach draws from two distinct and related disciplines:

User Based Design (or User Centred Design)

Design Thinking.

One of the distinguishing features of digital transformation is mass customization. By its very nature, customization is a result of the user--that is, the customer!--being involved to some degree in the design process.

When it comes to designing our mobility  ecosystems, where we want to both dramatically reduce the costs and impacts of traffic on cities and its citizens, while at the same time increasing the satisfaction and value of the personal transportation experience, there is no better way than to start with a Three Legged Stakeholder Community.

This is a process that ensures engagement and buy-in across the stakeholders, ensures a much greater transparency, and ensures a strategic coherence across the ecosystem.

More so, a user based, stakeholder approach to the design and development of our transportation systems ensures we fully explore what is possible.

Platform Based Ecosystem Orchestration

To put it simply, platform based ecosystem orchestration is the next generation of markets.

It is important for cities and citizens to understand that there can be no one company that can adequately provide the future of urban personal transportation.

The chaos of traffic and congestion, and the enormous costs that this inflicts of our cities and citizens is the result of a market based approach.

Ecosystem Orchestration is the best way to organize the future of urban mobility.

We can not solve for the complexity of today's challenges with yesterday's tools.

We have the technology, we have the knowledge. It is now up to pioneering citizens and professionals to bring their collective abilities together to design and develop tomorrow's business models and systems and infrastructure.

I believe there is no greater opportunity to transform business, society, and our cities than this, and that the SmartSwarms Business Design & Development System is the best way to enable this transformation.

If you are a professional looking for the challenge of a lifetime, join me in founding this venture. For those who catch on, you will blow past every expectation you had for the heights of your career.

If you are a citizen who is passionate about the future of our cities, and want to play a pioneering role in shaping that future, join us in the ongoing design process. For the civic citizen, there is no greater exercise of civic duty than contributing to the design of its future.

Together, we will make history.

Resources:

Platforms and Ecosystems: Enabling the Digital Economy

London Business School Review

McKinsey Insights

Revolutionizing Innovation: Users, Community, and Open Innovation

Platform Ecosystems: Aligning Architecture, Governance and Strategy

What Is Next For Design Thinking

Orchestrating Transformation: How To Delivery Winning Performance with a Connected Approach to Change

Design Thinking for Strategic Innovation

Strategy For A Networked World

Accelerating Digital Innovation Inside and Out: Agile Teams, Ecosystems, and Ethics

Cascades: How To Create A Movement That Drives Transformational Change

The Crossroads

Robert Johnson, waiting for the Devil. 

The Crossroads

When you are standing at a crossroads in your life, realise that the greatest block that you can put in front of your Self is the idea that there is a right choice. 

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

Economic Ecologies, and Other Random Musings

So here we are, at The Crossroads. One path is towards (what we will generally call) Digital Ecosystems, the other path being (generally) Industrial Chains. Is there a "right choice"? This depends on how much stock one (Self?) puts into strategy. Strategy is tightly bound with world views, and its close cousin, mental models. Strategy is the difference between luck and brains. If one were to dig into the research, we would be surprised to discover that more businesses, be that the business of you, or large scale corporations, rely more on luck than brains. Which is to say, doing things you've always done with some kind of belief that this will work out. Which is to say, fate over strategy. 

Strategy begins with having a deep understanding about the environment in which your business pertains to operate within, with a framework for how you're going to create value within that environment, for whom, and some sort of reciprocation from which a profit is derived. 

Herein lies the problem. Strategy requires thinking and communication, both of which require collective intelligence, design thinking, and a framework for development. 

However, the cult of business worships individualism and strong, decisive leadership, which tends towards hierarchical organisations. 

What strategy requires, and what business cult tendencies gravitate towards are not compatible. 

If we wanted to boil this down to a couple of simple words, I will nominate Ego Gratification. 

If we were to devote the necessary time into evolutionary psychology, we would be somewhat amused, and mildly horrified, to learn the difference between us, and say apes, is very little. 

Which, roughly translated, is that the vast majority of chiefs running businesses as the agency for others would prefer to operate on the "gut instincts" of their, um, human nature--which often gets spectacularly rewarded!! (even as the length of tenure continues to shorten)--than to engage in the humility of real strategic thinking. The evidence is overwhelming in that this is a recipe for failure, or at best, treading water. The evidence is overwhelming that the vast majority of businesses are treading water, and/or are sinking. 

To wit, change is diabolically hard. Emphasis diabolical.  

Wait, What About Economic Ecologies??

We'll get to this. For now, we need to keep two things in mind. Ecologies are complex. Economics (the big E Economics) has for the better part of two centuries, hitched its wagon to mechanical physics. 

Hopefully you understand the two notions of complexity and mechanics are incompatible. 

It's Complicated

Here's the thing (as a colleague habitually prefaced his opinions with), if we had to say one grand (positive) thing about our twentieth century , it is that we mastered the complicated.  Mechanics are complicated. Mechanical systems are complicated. Given our human ingenuity, give us some (okay, lots) of computing power, we can solve the complicated. This ability has put men on the moon (it's more complex as to why no women made it to the moon, but I digress)  and given us spectacular gains in standards of living. (never mind that pesky gap in wealth distribution).

The best and the brightest (okay, white males of privileged backgrounds) rose to the top of the food chains by their mastery, their expertise of the complicated. 

That we can put men on the moon, robotics on Mars, but yet get bitch-slapped by the common cold is a warning. I'll let you figure that out. 

However. 

The mastery of the complicated is seeing ever decreasing returns and margins. Put another way, Complicated Mastery is now a commodity. Put yet another way, you've been commoditised.  Sorry. 

This trend serves as the introduction for a term I'm sure you've heard of, that is going to kill us (well, you. hopefully not me)--The Innovator's Dilemma. 

The Innovator's Dilemma is when you've been commoditised (or possibly disrupted if we really want to go all Clayton Christensen on your ass), but your ego defences (your ego has prevented you from even possibly understanding ego defences) is preventing you from understanding what you do not know about what you do not know. 

You might have to read that last line several times.

Your self worth (and marketable value) is tied to what you Do Know, and probably even blinded you to your falling market value (macro=organisation, micro=you). Your only buffer at this point is so many businesses are caught in the Innovator's Dilemma trap, they just keep recycling the same basic formula hoping for better results (and passing this off as strategy, only because the Board itself doesn't know any different). Which means they can keep recycling you. 

I'll leave it for you to decide if you're on one of those rat wheel things so often lampooned in business cartoons, or if you are stuck in a Dilbert comic strip. I guess if you're still making your mortgage and and Mercedes payments, and your kids are in the right schools, its a bit of a tie at the moment. Hopefully you can retire soon. 

Because...

It's Complex. Actually. 

Here's the good news!!! There's a boatload of gold for solving (sic) in the world of complex!! And we're talking monopolies here!! We're actually talking so much f**king gold, your boat will sink under the weight!! I'll order you a martini. Double, shaken (vodka, not gin). 

Here's the bad news. You're clueless in this world. It gets worse. You're worse than clueless, you're damaging. Right. I'll get you another martini. 

Oh, and by the way, that fork in the crossroads? That iconic re-enactment of Robert Johnson standing there, waiting for the Devil? That somewhat palpable salve of possible choice? As in maybe there isn't a right or wrong choice? Digital or Industrial? 

I hate (I lie, I love) to popgun the pseudo-guru-babble, but that train has left the station. 

The world in which your value resides is going to be eaten by platform based ecosystems. And I'll bet dollars to donuts you barely have the foggiest notion of what that means. 

I'll cut to the chase. If you don't know how you are going to create and bring value to the ecosystem where your business is tenuously residing, you're either dead or dying. 

No business is immune. None. Don't kid yourself. 

That gold? That can only be had through platform based ecosystem orchestration. If you don't understand what that means, at best you're an instrument in somebody else's orchestra (platform), which means you get to survive well enough to tread water. 

At worse? You're the wildebeest about to cross the crocodile infested waters desperately hoping to get to that economic ecology on the other side of the river. Crossing the chasm is an understatement.   

Platform based ecosystems are the next generation of markets that are 100% customer centric.   That is, increasingly customised offerings supplied through a market meshed of third party vendors (read: instruments).

The gold, as it were, lies in the Mastering of Ecosystem Orchestration, which is to say, mastering complexity and the new world of (digital) strategy. 

It bears repeating, your ego is a detriment here. Your swash-buckling individualism and gut instincts are damaging. Like cancer damaging. Sorry. I'd offer you another martini but you would probably puke it back up onto my shiny white Puma runners. 

Economic Ecologies: The Next Generation. 

The economics of now are based on the science of biology and biological systems (complexity), NOT the science of mechanics and mechanical systems (complicated). 

We understand our economic environments as highly complex, interdependent ecosystems. We will manage, and Not Control these systems through much more advanced management systems that are based on the science of collective intelligence, augmented with artificial intelligence, using design thinking, and the resultant advanced models of development (innovation, in the old industrial language). 

Ecosystem orchestration is a vastly different set of skills and proficiencies than that of the commanding controls of an industrial economic business model. 

The future that we are irreversibly in is a competition between ecosystems of which individual business species are a part of. It is vital to your future that you understand at a very deep level how your business is going to contribute to the health of your ecosystem. You know, your strategy. 

Even if you are not the orchestrator, there's decent margins to be had by being an invaluable collaborator in the ecosystem. 

To do that, you have to accept the two premises fore-shadowed in quotes that opened this little post. The option of that fork in the road is an illusion, and that doing the same thing over and over again expecting (better) different results is insanity, and eventually fatal. 

Can you change? You tell me. But do know this. Those (including me) who are seeking a mastery of ecosystem orchestration will ruthlessly weed you out if you do not. We can not afford cancerous behaviours in our systems. 

If you chose change, start with your ego. It may have gotten you to here, but it will not get you to there. 

~~GDE

 

The Return of the Generalist

Specialisation is stifling innovation.

So says this report from the World Economic Forum, Innovation is dying, and experts are to blame.

As a life long generalist, this is music to my ears, as I've felt stifled because my game plans and avenues to unique value creation on predicated on specialisation.

The solution to our lost innovative capacity might therefore be relatively simple.

Instead of focusing on hiring specialists or experts in a particular field, we should hire generalists of a broad mind, capable of thinking outside the box. Hiring independent innovators outside of institutional structures might be one way of protecting them from the pressures of specialisation.

Funding and grants should also be less tied to how much someone has specialised, and more to how inventive or creative they actually are. Our system should move more towards this kind of merit-based ideal, rather than focusing on expertise and certification.

Beyond this, businesses can consider challenging staff with lateral thinking. The key is to push staff beyond their narrow jobs and into new fields and endeavours that challenge them to think in new ways. Younger workers in particular should play a greater role in contributing to the ideas, products and inventions of a company, rather than being excluded until they have gained the relevant degrees or qualifications.

I second this recommendation!

Teaming For Audacious Innovation: The Future of Urban Auto Transportation.

Glia Ecosystems

Designing, Developing, Delivering The Future of Urban Auto Transportation

"3Ding" The Future

As you are reading this, I know you are already nearly as excited as I am, about the journey we are embarking on together. Together as a team, we’ll become even more excited about the challenges and prospects this journey represents.
As a team--a team of teams!--we are collectively “designing, developing and delivering” one of the most advanced organizations of the 21st century, an organization whose purpose is to bring to society the future of urban auto transportation.
The value we will co-create for citizens, cities, and the auto ecosystem will be the greatest transformation the world has ever seen.
That is really something to get excited about!

Building a platform that can attract and orchestrate an ecosystem of vendors and brands, from very big, to very small, that can continuously “Design, Develop, and Deliver” the future of urban auto transportation, while creating win-win-win value for the platform participants, our host cities, and our consumers, will be nearly impossibly hard.
That degree of difficulty--which is really only an artificial obstacle--and our ability to blow past that, is our competitive advantage.
It is important for us to understand, that while technologies and its advancements are crucial pieces of the puzzle to our business, a puzzle that will continually morph, these technologies only form the substrate to our business.
Our business is people, and the society we are embedded in.

To overcome the challenges inherent in our journey, to create the satisfying wins along the way, it will be a matter greatly as to how well we can come together, function and perform as a team, the Core Team, that will make the difference.

Here are two things we know for sure:
1)--The auto industry is going to go through radical transformation.
2)--We know how to design, develop and grow the organization that will facilitate that transformation.

Those are two knowns we can be assured of that we can hang our hats on.

How much of the value of this transformation that will be created overall, that we can create, that we can capture, that is entirely up to us.

With this broad understanding, let’s look at some of the most important skills and things we need to continually excel at.

Learning to learn, communicating and dialogue,  leadership and personal development, team building, network orchestration, and continuously developing these skills in others.

In concert, these skills, and we as people, will continually create the environment where other can excel at developing our collective purpose.  
Abilities are the talents we individually bring, be that coding, marketing, product development, engineering, etcetera.
The skills that we value are what will elevate us to the top of our game, and to the top of our field.

Particular to our organization, is a system I developed called Smart Swarms Systems (3S). It exists now only as an abstraction, as due to its nature, we have to learn, develop and grow that system together.

3S will be a highly refined form of collective intelligence.  It is vital to value creation and network orchestration in ecosystems, and as practitioners and nodes (think neurons in the brain) in this system (this hive mind we could say), excelling at using it, and contributing to it, will form a core competency across the Glia Ecosystem, that others will find difficult to match.
The 3S is critical for creating bonds and information & knowledge value flows throughout the ecosystem, for making smart decisions at all points, for swiftly moving ideas to creation and production (in conjunction with the best known principles and practices of productive innovation), for organization and orchestration of value, for organizational balance of individual and group identity, for understanding the business and competitive environment.  

Most importantly, when coupled with data technology, the data flows will allow us to develop real time mapping of the Glia Ecosystem, that will be a vital tool for transparency and  visualizing value creation flows, and trouble spots within the ecosystem.

The other half to our core values and collective wisdom, is truly, deeply understanding the very nature of social business ecosystems, why they represent the future of business organization, and that of value creation and harvesting.
Our dedication to the skills, values, and systems is what will make Glia Ecosystems the standard by which all others are measured.

Nothing energizes me more in the morning than that of the thought of working with you, with us, and our open ended opportunity to create the future.

If I can instil that in you, and we in everyone that joins our organization, our purpose, our lives will define what it means to be wealthy in the 21st century.
If this is the challenge and opportunity you have been looking for, contact me now, and lets find out if you have what it takes to be part of this team. Yours truly,

Gregory D. Esau

Glia as a Platform--The Basics

Artificial Neural Networks

What is Glia?

Glia is a distributed platform concept designed to bring public and private enterprise along with citizens and public/private business leaders, along with knowledge networks together to “design, develop and deliver the future of urban auto transportation”.
These vested parties and stakeholders are the 'social business ecosystem', with Glia as its 'Organizational Operating System'.
The Glia architecture places the power hubs of urban auto transportation system within the cities themselves, to the benefit of their local business people, and citizens.
The platform allows cities worldwide to 'plug into' the system, allowing networks of scale.

Glia is a business and organizational model that enables a distributed approach to Transportation as a Service (TaaS), and for orchestrating the complexity of third party vendors, the public sector, along with empowered individuals for the design, development and delivery of such a service.

The name Glia comes from a neurological cell dubbed the “social glue”, an ideal name for social networks with a purpose. What started as a terrific, smart and engaged group of people on the interest based social network, Google Plus, who were looking for ways to develop a social platform to create socially beneficial businesses, products and services, Glia has evolved to focus on the future of our urban auto transportation.

More than just a platform, it is an economic philosophy to harmonize society and business, and the development of people for what some are calling the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Why Do We Need Such A Platform?

A well designed and populated platform allows anyone with a vested interest to contribute to the process of value creation. Platforms have the ability to attract the wide and diverse knowledge and expertise necessary to solve complex problems, and co-develop the kinds of innovation needed for new value creation.

When it comes to something as complex as auto transportation as a service, where a large variety of public and private stakeholders are involved, we can bring all of them together in an online space, to share knowledge and insights, collaborate, co-design, and imagineer the future of urban transportation.

Platforms, and the social-business ecosystems they develop, also distribute risk and reward, making for robust and resilient businesses, that are highly adaptive to the ever shifting and evolving economic landscape. Because of their community driven nature, these platforms are much more sensitive to local economies over that of the corporate models.

The key to platform performance is its ability to attract and aggregate networks of knowledge and skills. Geography or singular business units are no barriers to these networks, and as platforms expand from city to city, the sharing and creative capacity grows exponentially.

Deep pools of the necessary knowledge, know how and expertise can form into clusters, furthering the ability of the platform to high performance.

A strong sense of community, ownership, and vested interest often becomes a defining aspect of the well designed platform.

As such, this gives cities and their citizens a way to be part of the leadership and development over our transportation future that we might not have otherwise. Furthermore, this allows the evolution of co-ownership business models, where cities and their citizens can have an ownership stake in what the famed consulting firm McKinsey and Company describes as: Driven by shared mobility, connectivity services, and feature upgrades, new business models could expand automotive revenue pools by about 30 percent, adding up to $1.5 trillion.

We all know how important continual innovation and applied innovation is to the future prosperity of society and business. Well designed platforms with a cultivation of an open source problem solving culture can provide the optimal environment for continually applied innovation for a wide and deep pool of value creation.

Our cities and their citizens should be able to contribute and share in this massive pool of value creation.

Why is This Important?

The most significant issue here is the generation of personal and collective data that is becoming the most valuable resource in this “fourth industrial revolution” and who owns and controls that data.

Of equal importance, is who is going to own and manage the future of urban transportation.

We believe in creating and developing the models that allow all vested stakeholders to extract the most value from the data, while at the same time guarding the privacy concerns of people and businesses is paramount.

Conflict of Interest

Many of the current big players that are already shaping our transportation future are public companies listed on the stock exchanges, and are therefore obliged to their shareholders. The tech companies of Silicon Valley, while creating an enormous amount of innovation and value over the last decades, also adhere to a more libertarian philosophy that may also conflict with the best interests of cities and citizens.

It doesn't have to be this way. The window is open for developing our future in a way that benefits the public and private enterprises, our cities, and their citizens.

As Jenny Lindqvist, Global Head of Intelligent Transport Systems, Ericsson, said at a recent New Cities Foundation conference on our Urban Mobility Future, “We need to work towards building an ecosystem rather than an ego-system,”

By this she means we need to put the health of the overall (transportation) system over that of the individual need for control and profit maximization.

The Future of Urban Auto Transportation?

Imagine a future where upwards of 80% of the cars are gone from the road, where private ownership of a car is now rare, and most of us subscribe to a “transportation service” (Transportation as a Service--TaaS).

What would that be like?

Owning and operating a vehicle is most people’s second biggest expense, and not a particularly good investment.

The promise of TaaS, is to bring us more convenience, while lowering our transportation costs. Our liability exposure also decreases.

For cities, the shift is absolutely profound. This will change how transportation infrastructure is needed, how it’s developed, and how highways, roads and streets are designed and maintained, and dramatically changes our city environments to becoming much more people centric.

Imagine the health and well being of our cities and citizens with such a dramatic reduction in vehicles clogging our streets, and the resources spent to accommodate them. Owning and operating a vehicle is often a stressful, and costly endeavour. The future of auto transportation can bring people the choice to free themselves from this burden.

Other issues at stake are things like public and private parking (and the revenues they generate), traffic fines and enforcement, insurance and liability, who owns and operates the vehicles of the TaaS, who supplies the rider experiences and value added services, and so forth.

The Sharing Economy

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is more than just breath-taking technological change and advancement. It’s also about new economic models and opportunities.

The opportunity here is to development new ownership-stakeholder models that can both generate wealth creation, and distribute wealth generation.

Much has been said and written on how technology and capitalism are “destroying jobs” and “concentrating wealth”.

However, these same technologies can also create new business models and ownership stakes. A new kind of “networked capitalism”, that blurs the line between the worker and the owner, facilitating the mechanisms of wealth creation and distribution.

For futurists, these social and technological trends can lead to either a utopia or a distopia. While hopefully the extreme scenarios are limited in odds, today we can also make choices and conscientious efforts to work towards shared prosperity rather than wealth concentration.

For the Glia platform, our culture and philosophy is geared towards shared prosperity. Join us in helping us all get there!

About Me

Gregory D Esau

CEO & Founder Glia Social Business Ecosystems

Developer of SmartSwarms Organizational Intelligence

Since the early 1990’s, I have been passionately engaged in learning about the evolution of distributed economic and business models, and acquiring the knowledge and knowledge networks, so as to apply these models to business and social challenges and opportunities.

I have used my thirty years of business experience in the highly competitive, challenging, and rewarding world of custom home construction, and general construction, to further hone my applicable skills and knowledge, so I can provide the leadership, guidance and business experience to value creation in the 21st century.

This passionate pursuit, combined with my work history, has led me to developing a broad knowledge base, a broad knowledge network, and the skills that enables me to “orchestrate” the building and development of distributed business organizational systems, the leadership and coaching required for such systems, and to oversee and guide the necessary technical, business and social development.

Based on my continual research, along with strong evidence, I believe it will be the kinds of systems and models I advocate that will give society and business the best odds of a strong, sustainable distributed economic prosperity, and broad social well being.

In the May 15, 2013 Provincial Election, I ran for the Green Party in the Vancouver Kingsway riding, under the slogan of “A Vote For Me, Is A Vote For We”.