Product Details - Electronic Book
Format: Acrobat Reader (PDF)
File Size: 6MB
Required Software: Acrobat Reader 6.0 or higher
Publisher: Lowrey Press, October 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-9722810-9-6
ISBN: 0-9722810-3-7
Price: $12.00

Summary

The basic findings of this book are the following:

1. Commerce is an exchange between people, each giving the other something. What is exchanged can be physical, emotional, or intellectual in form. It encompasses a comprehensive and pervasive set of behaviors that extends across every human life and all arenas of human activity. It is commerce between a man and a woman that creates human life. It is through the commerce between a child and its family that each child is protected, reared, and supported in its development and its family experiences the pride, joy, and excitement of witnessing a human life unfold. It is through our exchanges with others and our physical world that we expand our information and knowledge, develop our skills, hone our proficiencies, and progressively discover who we are as unique individuals. And, yes, it is through commerce that we obtain the material goods and services that we either cannot produce or choose not to produce for ourselves.

2. The traditional economic use of the term that views commerce as the buying and selling of goods is myopic at best. A true understanding of human commerce must incorporate facts descriptive of the full range of its occurrence, including what is exchanged and why.

3. All economic models attempt to describe, predict, explain, and enable the control of commercial activity, as each model defines it, in an effort to ensure its success. Deductive economic models derive their principles from their assumptions about human nature since it is human behavior they explain. Commerce, as a human activity, expresses people's motivations, goals, values, and social orientations. It is a model's assumptions about human nature that determine how it defines the purpose that commerce serves, the behaviors people will engage in to accomplish that purpose, and how they will define success.

4. Capitalism is founded on the assumption that all people everywhere have the same nature (Homo economicus). The core elements of this sameness are that people are materialistically focused, radically individualistic, and always self-serving. They act rationally to maximize their personal profit or received value, both of which are measured monetarily. Essentially, people are egoistic self-maximizers. Capitalism also assumes that, within commercial contexts, no asymmetries of information or power exist between people. Thus, despite their self-maximizing drive, no individual can just take from or otherwise exploit another because no one has power greater than the person whose resource they seek. Hence, all commerce is resolved through negotiated settlements that provide sufficient satisfaction to each party to warrant agreement. All such transactions are therefore deemed "free and fair."

5. Wealthy people who are materialistically focused, egoistic self-maximizers are served well by Capitalism because, by design, it advantages the already wealthy and serves as a powerful social control mechanism that serves to mask the unrelenting exploitation of the many by the few. As a real-world functional economic system, however, evidence is both overwhelming and indisputable, Capitalism fails. It does not deliver its promised benefits. It is flawed internally as a logical model, produces harmful societal effects, and the assumptions it is built upon do not map to the findings of empirical science.

6. Empirical research demonstrates that not all people match Capitalism's image of humankind. That research reveals that the largest segment of evolved humanity is natively cooperative and other-regarding in their orientation toward others. They value being connected with others and behave in ways that take others into consideration, even at a cost to their material gain and welfare.

7. These cooperative, other-regarding people also strive to emerge as unique individuals. Their striving for individuation is both expressed and advanced through mutually beneficial commerce with others. This portion of humanity has no commercial model to guide their pursuit of commerce in a way that reflects who they are. This book offers such a model.

The book is organized into three parts. The first part (Chapter 2 and all of Section I) explains why we need a replacement for Capitalism, develops our understanding of commercial models (economic systems) in general, and describes the foundations of the Life Enabling model, an economic system that ensures all organizational decisions and actions protect, nurture, and enrich human life and the ecosystem that supports all life. The second part (Sections II, III, and IV) presents, in detail, how a Life Enabling commercial enterprise is organized and conducts commerce. The third part (Section V) summarizes the content of this book and presents its implications.

About the Authors

Raphael L. Vitalo received his doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He has authored 50 professional articles, technical reports, and chapters in the areas of psychology, education, business management and commerce, information systems, and artificial intelligence.
Dr. Vitalo worked in community mental health during the first segment of his 50-year career as a therapist, researcher, and clinical director of three mental health centers. Under his clinical leadership, each center dramatically improved in its delivery of care. For example, in the second of those centers, his staff improved the success of their treatment outcomes by 31% (from 70% to 92% of clients reported benefit from care), reduced dropouts from treatment by more than 50%, expanded the number of people served with the same level of staff by 20%, and produced a per-unit cost of care that was 56% below the national average. In the next phase of his career, Dr. Vitalo worked as a business consultant. He has designed, managed, and implemented more than 400 projects serving public and private sector organizations in the areas of strategic planning, organizational effectiveness, performance management, workforce productivity, business process reengineering, risk management, applications of the Quality and Lean Enterprise models, knowledge engineering, information systems design and development, and expert systems design and development. He is currently the president of Vital Enterprises.

Christopher J. Bujak is a managing partner of Continual Impact, a consulting group providing consulting and training in continuous improvement. Chris is a mechanical engineer by formal training with extensive postgraduate training and experience in the application of Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma methodologies and tools. As global director of continuous improvement (CI) for Air Products and Chemicals, Inc., Chris was one of the principle developers of an integrated CI model that included Lean Enterprise, Six Sigma™, and other critical enabling elements. This global initiative yielded $13 million (2021 current U.S. dollars) in savings during its first year of implementation, $21.1 million in its second year, and over $68 million in its third year. His work with Continual Impact has reached some 200 organizations, with more than 4,000 people trained and engaged in continuous improvements efforts. His recent focus has been on public health organizations across the U.S.