Patrick Andrews

Can we cooperate our way out of trouble? A review of ‘The Resilience Imperative’

I spent many years as a corporate lawyer, employed by large corporations to fly around the world and do deals. That is, until I realised that the businesses I worked for, although admirable in many ways, weren’t properly taking into account their impact on people and planet. They were (very efficiently) running in the wrong direction. So ten years ago I left the corporate world and went looking for better models for business, working with charities, fair trade businesses and cooperatives. I soon realised that none of the old models are really serving us any more. Corporations place too much emphasis on shareholders’ needs, while cooperatives place too much emphasis on the collective needs of their community, and neither properly take into account the needs of individuals, of society as a whole or the ecological needs of the planet. What is required, I concluded, is a fundamental re-think our basic organising models for business and to adopt structures that are scaleable and designed to serve multiple stakeholders. But what might this look like?

February 27, 2013

Leave a Comment