COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

My email message in response to the Social Enterprise Associates Newsletter for Summer 2012 from Drew Tulchin WWW.SOCIALENTERPRISE.NET Consulting solutions...

Dear Drew

I am in my 70s and have reached a stage in my career where there is no future ... this is very liberating, because I have no need to worry about any future jobs and can pretty much say what is on my mind without fear of negative consequences.

My agenda for a very long time has been centered on metrics. Unless you have the right metrics, you will get the wrong results. The money profit capitalist market system works very well in allocating resources to economic activities that deliver money profit, but does not work at all well for economic activity that is needed to improve quality of life especially for very poor people. A metric beyond money profit is needed in order to provide the incentive to allocate resources to improve society and people's' quality of life. I call this true valueadd, a metric that should be used routinely to complement money profit.

A lot of the ground work has already been done to understand the component parts of true valuadd ... whether it is in environment, in health, in education, in ecology, in security and a lot more. Money profit is used in multiple business sectors .... similarly true valuadd must work across all sectors of society and economy.

I like what your organization wants to do ... but what about the metrics?

Peter Burgess
@truevaluemetric
truevaluemetrics.org