I am a “practitioner/scholar” who studies leadership in close day-to-day cooperation with executives and teams grappling with major challenges. I have been embedded in organizations for years at a time, while thinking like a social scientist as well as a strategist.

I introduced the theory of business ecosystems strategy-making into the management world in the early 1990s; the ideas were developed in the late 1980s. The point was to show that metaphors of business as war, and business as bargaining power, were damaging to society and self-destructive of innovation. I emphasized that businesses co-evolve in ecosystems with others and shape their shared futures. This idea is now central to modern business.

My current work focuses on the Theory of Free and builds on Eric Raymond’s Gift Economy. The idea is that the most important work of society is work that needs to be freely given and freely received.

A society advances by increasing its ability to support care, such as care for children, that can only really work when it is freely given and received. The relationship of “give-receive” is special. It has evolved to be instinctual in people and is at the center of much that people find most joyful. Free persons acting with others in crowds—at live sports events, music concerts, dances—are among the most powerful, potential-opening experiences people have.

Network effects are key to understanding how societies expand the realm of the free. Societies are successful when they expand this realm. Shared language, infrastructure, technology, and care for one another expand what people can do freely. Network effects are at the core of these coordinating technologies. They enable innovation through joint problem solving, shared time and talents, interaction, and learning. This leads to greater productivity and more ability for people to focus on the free.

With the expansion of the realm of free, we give one another the opportunity to do what can only be free—caregiving, friendship, and camaraderie.

The problems of society are freedom and care failures, not market failures. Society should be designed to honor, give dignity to, and make skillful all that requires care and must be freely given. A society fails when it makes the basics of life so expensive that most people must spend most of their time doing things compelled by those who have money to hire. This turns them away from caring and sacrifices overall care, with terrible long-term effects.

The great success of modern technology can be that it expands the domain of free by reducing the cost of what cannot be totally free—the hard stuff of food, housing, safety, and so on. But this will not happen if technology is commandeered and enclosed by a few people, who then sell essential goods at high profit margins and fund “guaranteed basic income” so people can buy. The problem is that this keeps people in the money economy when they could be in the care and enjoyment world.

Open-source software, when it functions as a gift economy, is a vast cooperative where people share talents and, to quote Kahlil Gibran, “work is love made visible.”

Recent studies of women’s contributions to society in the 1800s indicate that some of the most valuable progress and innovation came from women’s work—almost entirely unpaid. Or rather, as often as possible, freely given.

Separate studies of technology during the Industrial Revolution show that many productivity gains came not from large generational technologies, but from constant tinkering among millions of people who, in the United States, felt empowered to make and benefit from improvements they and their friends made.

In both studies we see a vision of a different kind of economic and social accounting, one that makes central the benefits of “free” work: caregiving, solving small but important problems, and sharing ideas and tips as the heart of real social advancement.

We see a macro effect of the same kind in today’s world economy. In general, the Chinese economy is focused on producing inexpensive but high-quality basic products of the new society—electric cars, solar cells, batteries, wind power—and across society producing inexpensive grid energy, affordable housing, safe streets, dignified transportation, and free or affordable education and health care.

China itself is creating a vast social capacity for people to do what they and society as a whole value. And on world markets, this democratizing of technology is winning because the democracies of today are where people can vote with their wallets: goods are affordable, more people are enfranchised, and there is more equality.

My personal faith is central. My experience is that people are, for the most part, brilliant, creative, caring, meaning-seeking, and guided by important spiritual experience.

Photo taken at Walden Pond, Concord, Massachusetts.