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It’s high time to re-imagine how and where we work

By Matthew Bauer

As originally in the May/June Sustainable Industries Issue, Bridging a Digital Divide

If you have been following the news as of late, it is likely that you have seen one or more articles on the virtues or the downside of telework, all taking cues from Yahoo!’s (Nasdaq:  YHOO) recent decision to recall its teleworkers back to the “factory.” The debate has covered the pros and cons extensively, so I will spare you the emotion here and focus on the past, present and future of work as we know it, and where it’s going, whether you like it or not. Just the facts ma’am!

First, I would like to thank Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer for sparking the debate, which was probably not her intention.  How we work has been a long overdue national discussion. As with most things (i.e. religion, politics, sports), there is no clear right or wrong answer in this debate; maybe all the articles and commentary should have lead off with a disclaimer as such. In Yahoo!’s case, it was not telework, but rather a decline in company culture and inability to measure how or what work was actually getting done, that sparked the announcement. Yahoo! is circling the wagons and starting over, which is what Mayer was brought there to do. Good on you.

Let’s kick off our installment in this worthwhile debate with a look back, way back: For most of recorded history, the nature of work has been a real slog for the masses. Transitions from hunting and gathering all day to feed ourselves (95% of our species’ history) to agriculture, servitude, feudal existence, the manual labor of it all – advances were at a snail’s pace. In a relatively small sliver of time, really just a few hundred years, the acceleration has been almost dizzying: the Industrial Age, globalization, computers, the Internet, and instantaneous global media coverage. Transitions that used to be measured in decades and centuries now take months and a few years

At the same time, the Industrial Age has been fading into the new realities of a service-based economy – an economy based on knowledge workers, and an economy where location is becoming less and less a factor. A funny thing happened on the way to the water cooler during the transition, though: most workers have kept on reporting to the “factory” for work. The nature of the work really has little or nothing to do with the place we actually perform that work. With all this technology in the ground and in the air, we have lawyers, accountants, consultants, nonprofit staff, government workers, lobbyists, tech support, software engineers, customer support, administrative workers, who predomnantly still drive, train and fly to the “factory” most days. Twenty years ago, this made sense. We didn’t have the public Internet, processes, automation and the playing field for knowledge workers to really thrive. Now?

Fast forward to 2013. What an amazing opportunity! For the first time in history, one can make a good living from most any home or office in America, most likely with a great deal of flexibility and greater lifestyle than ever before enjoyed in history. As foretold decades ago by Peter Drucker, the age of the knowledge worker is upon us. However, collectively we are doing very little to connect the dots and bring the untold benefits of remote work into the fold. Whether remote means five miles or 5,000 miles to a worker, the experiment is over. Examples such as IBM (NY SE: IBM), the U.S. Trade and Patent Office, U.S. Army, and our own little beauty, BetterWorld Telecom, all rely on telework and remote work as a backbone of their operations – seeking and utilizing the best talent available, regardless of location. The opportunity of this generation lies in the social and environmental benefits, cost savings and leadership our country can provide the world by creating a national movement around a #workshift.

Location-based work is a dinosaur awaiting extinction. The two largest contributors to America’s carbon emissions are buildings and transportation.  Commuting to office buildings makes up most of that number. In sum, the leading contributor to carbon and environmental emissions in the United States is squarely rooted in how we work. Roughly 5% of the U.S. workforce telecommutes most days. If that number was 50% of those able to telecommute, we could cut our carbon emissions by 50%, while saving 453 million barrels of oil and slashing the 2.1 billion hours we waste in traffic jams every year (Source: “From Workplace to Anyplace,” World Wildlife Fund). It would be the equivalent of taking 15 million cars off the road. Add in health costs, traffic deaths and injuries and lost productivity and it doesn’t take a genius to realize our current version of work is in need of a reboot. As Kirkpatrick Sale wrote in “Human Scale” more than 33 years ago,“…the madness of American transportation leads to only one conclusion: no solution of the transportation puzzle is possible until work and home are put back together.”

On the social side of the equation the benefits pile up even higher. Companies that have effectively embraced telework tend to be more open and democratic by nature, which is a starting point for greater productivity and the evolution towards a more responsible, sustainable business framework. It’s also a reflection of company values in being results-oriented, regardless of when and how employees work, versus being hyper-controlling with a clock-watching mentality. It’s about employee trust and empowerment, expanding opportunities for those with geographic and physical challenges.  We are headed in a new direction whether managers of traditional work models like it or not. Telework is starting to scale up significantly. It’s seen 15% growth since 1990 and is expected to impact 50% of the workforce by 2020 (Source: “Remote Work,” Cornell University, 2011). In addition, 36% of employers planned to hire contract workers in 2012, up from 28% in 2009 (Source: CareerBuilder.com). More than 4 million jobs are available today while 12 million people are unemployed (Source: “With Positions to Fill, Employers Wait for Perfection,” New York Times, March 6, 2013). And don’t forget those Millennials, who, on the whole, are seeking alternative work environments and will break the mold that has been dominant for decades.

Work is consistently dividing into smaller pieces, placing increased reliance on knowledge workers to fill in the gaps as contractors rather than full-time employees. “In the future, it will make more sense to work on a project-by-project basis, similar to how crews work on movies…and then, upon completion of the project, go their separate ways,” write Mayard Webb in “Rebooting Work.” Contract work tends to be done remotely. Contract work also doesn’t count in unemployment numbers published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor. With unemployment stagnant and contract work rising, we should be rethinking how we measure what constitutes a job.

However, there remains a “digital divide” – a giant chasm where so much opportunity is missed by those lacking access to state-of-the-art telework technologies. The greatest opportunity we have today to lower unemployment and build permanent social change is to bridge this gap and create a knowledge-based work force. Many countries around the world have pursued this strategy, lifting millions of people out of poverty and providing longterm sustainable careers. With ongoing “broadband-to-work” training programs, they are focused on readying their citizens for the New Economy. It’s a model we must adapt to ensure the sustainability and growth of the U.S. economy.

At the core of the new knowledge-worker paradigm is the removal of location from the equation. From the supply side, this opens the door to all of those rapped in “job deserts” – from the single mother in downtown Detroit and the struggling family in rural Oklahoma to the nearly 20 million U.S. citizens with physical disabilities that make it difficult to get to and from the factory.

The big idea here is related to how Western society and much of the world has organized its work, schooling, government and other institutions in paternal, top-down fashion, packed with hierarchy and an implicit value on location. Cracks have begun to appear around how these relationships are transacted, and with new and emerging technologies, anchoring to a specific location makes less and less sense. A teacher standing in front of a classroom, a CEO pacing in a boardroom, the congresswoman speaking to the House chamber – with 6.2 billion cell phones now in service and hundreds of millions with Internet access, opportunity is blossoming for a truly connected “biosphere consciousness” as Jeremy Rifkin describes it. All this happened in the last 20 years. Looking at the next 20 more years, it’s going to get real interesting. Maybe this connectedness also offers a return to a more direct and organic way of growing, connecting and existing on this planet.

The current mode of work we find ourselves rooted in is just not tenable for the long term. It’s too expensive and unproductive. It’s our greatest source of pollution. It excludes so many potentially productive people who are relegated to local or regional options beneath their capabilities. We have proven, effective models and the technology to break the mold for good. Let’s enable this inevitable transition take hold sooner than later, and let’s reinvent America by re-imagining how and where we work. With heavy economic challenges facing the majority of Americans, there’s no reason to wait.

BetterWorld was out making change with fellow local businesses at this year’s BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies) conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The 2012 BALLE Business Conference: Real Prosperity Starts Here conference connected more than 700 community innovators, business owners, and investors to people, resources and ideas to unleash local prosperity.

BetterWorld President Matt Bauer stopped off to speak with Rob Trube of BizWestMichigan and talk a little about BetterWorld, B Corps, Worldblu, and BetterWork™.

BizWestMichigan Interview at BALLE 2012

BetterWorld Telecom was excited to attend the American Sustainable Business Council (ASBC) Business Summit this past June in Washington DC.

ASBC is an organization dedicated to the creation of public policy that acknowledges the large and growing community of sustainable and socially responsible enterprises.

With a growing network of nearly 50 business associations across the United States, representing over 150,000 businesses and 300,000 business executives, owners, investors, and others, ASBC is already a strong voice for change. These associations endorse principles of sustainable and socially-responsible responsible business, and they support the development of strong local Main Street economies.

More specifically, the mission of American Sustainable Business Council is to advance public policies that foster a vibrant, just, and sustainable economy. This is achieved through research and communication with businesses, policy makers, and the media how a sustainable economy based on broad prosperity is good for business and good for America. Also, ASBC provides a platform to enable businesses and business associations to engage executives, owners, investors, entrepreneurs, and other business professionals in the public debate. We’re proud to work with ASBC to help further both sustainability and economic success of Main Street small businesses.

Business and commutes are at a standstill today after an extreme fire in West Oakland put the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) system completely out of service between the East Bay and San Francisco. The resultant traffic and chaos from commuters attempting alternate methods of ferry, buses, and carpooling will likely result in something of a local holiday - as highways turn into parking lots. The growing density of the Bay Area and many urban corridors, puts individuals and businesses at the mercy of transit systems that are both fallible and already pushed to capacity.

If your business has flexible work systems in place, then a “carpocalyse” such as this won’t have nearly the destructive impact that it otherwise could on your team’s productivity. Creating company policy that effectively utilizes remote work and harnesses communication technology is a matter of resiliency and adaptation, not a radical leap or indulgent management style. The future of work requires this shift in managerial and company mindset. Despite the fact that many knowledge workers could efficiently and effectively do their work from home, most businesses default to a management and evaluation style designed for factory workers. It’s time for policy to match reality, we need to work more intelligently - for our health, productivity and transportation sanity.

But maybe you’re not convinced.  What does remote work look like exactly? What about the needs to have a home office, the benefits of face-to-face, the prestige of a nice office and coffee chat time? The reality is that shifting to a more flexible, remote work model with your organization is likely going to be a bit like a new exercise routine. The best tactic is to start small and build up a system that is tested and optimal for your team, activity, and industry. Obviously not all jobs can be done effectively in a remote work framework. The end game is not a one-size-fits-all solution, it is more about facing the reality that without this flexibility, your business and team are vulnerable to disasters like this morning’s commute on the Bay Bridge.

Here at BetterWorld, we’ve created a framework for working more effectively, called BetterWork (TM). The BetterWork whitepaper is the findings from a nine-month study at Bainbridge Graduate Institute on the impact of virtualization of communications infrastructure and remote work.

There’s also a large library of useful links on remote and flexible work in our Delicious link library. The majority of academic research in this area has been funded or motivated by transportation improvement efforts. But the benefits for companies and workers extend far beyond decreasing wasted hours spent sitting in traffic. Satisfaction, productivity, loyalty, in study upon study, all of these measures improve with a flexible work environment. For optimal productivity and company resiliency, flexible work needs to be taken seriously. This effort needs to be moved out of the category of traffic mitigation and into the spotlight as the key to our future - evolving our workplace frameworks  to catch up with the reality of this modern world.

What steps can you take to build a resilient organization? Are you prepared for a bridge closure, severe weather or public transit failure? The successful companies and organizations of tomorrow will be the ones who implement resilient, flexible work structures today.

Being a good business is like being a good gardener. Or so says William Rosenzwieg, 2010 recipient of the Oslo Business for Peace Award. Rosenzwieg is the Co-founder at Bay Area-based Physic Ventures and works with purpose-driven businesses like Recyclebank, Revolution Foods, GoodGuide, and Pharmaca Integrative Pharmacy.

The Oslo Business for Peace award is awarded by the Business for Peace Foundation, who, among other things, touts being Businessworthy as a modern day business gauge like creditworthiness. As stated on their website: What is Businessworthy? Similar to being Creditworthy, the concept of Businessworthy means applying your business energy ethically and responsibly with the purpose of creating economic value that also creates value for society. Sounds very similar to concepts like Benefit Corporations, the triple-bottom line (People, Planet, Profits) and Corporate Social Responsibility.

Rosenzweig highlights the parallels of the successful business person to the wisdom and outlook of a gardener in this excerpt from his award acceptance speech.

“A gardener sees the world as a system of interdependent parts - where healthy, sustaining relationships are essential to the vitality of the whole. “A real gardener is not a person who cultivates flowers, but a person who cultivates the soil.” In business this has translated for me into the importance of developing agreements and partnerships where vision and values, purpose and intent are explicitly articulated, considered and aligned among all stakeholders of an enterprise - customers, employees, suppliers, shareholders, and the broader community and natural environment.

Here at BetterWorld Telecom, we couldn’t agree more. Building partnerships with businesses and organizations who are aligned in mission and purpose is what we’re all about. We’re working to make telecom a force for good, through supporting organizations doing amazing things and making communication technology accessible.

Here’s some more excerpts from Rosenzweig’s speech:

Also gardening, like business, is inherently a local activity, set within an ever-changing and unpredictable global climate. Showing up in person, shovel - and humility in hand is essential.

I am just coming to understand this work of business gardening - and investing in keeping people healthy - as an act of universal responsibility. His Holiness Dalai Lama reminds me: “Each of us must learn to work not just for one self, one’s own family or one’s nation, but for the benefit of all humankind. Universal responsibility is the key to human survival. It is the best foundation for world peace.”

In Service,

The BetterWorld Team

Board of Supervisors Unanimously Approves City Incentives for New Type of Socially Responsible Corporations

Legislation Provides Bid Preferences to Benefit Corporations Contracting With the City

San Francisco, CA – The Board of Supervisors on Tuesday voted unanimously to support an ordinance sponsored by Board President David Chiu that will provide bid preferences on City contracts to Benefit Corporations, a new form of a corporate entity recently authorized by the State of California. The ordinance will be voted on for a second time next Tuesday, April 24, with passage expected.

“As the first city to provide contracting preferences to Benefit Corporations, San Francisco is again leading the nation by supporting new types of socially responsible companies” said Supervisor Chiu. “Since benefit corporations create value for shareholders and society at the same time, we are demonstrating our commitment to sustainability, economic innovation, and social entrepreneurialism.”

The City currently provides contract bid preferences to local businesses, a program administered by the Human Rights Commission.  This new bid preference for Benefit Corporations is modeled after this existing program. However, the bid preference for Benefit Corporations cannot be used to outbid a local business.

In October 2011, Governor Jerry Brown signed Assembly Bill 361, making California the sixth state to charter this new kind of corporation, joining New Jersey, Virginia, Hawaii, Vermont and Maryland.  A Benefit Corporation is defined as 1) having a corporate purpose to create a material positive impact on society and the environment; 2) redefining fiduciary duty to require consideration of non-financial interests when making corporate decisions; and 3) reporting on its overall social and environmental performance using recognized third party standards.

Currently, there are over 450 Certified Benefit Corporations in 60 different industries nationwide. These companies measure their impact on society and the environment with a third party standard and include stakeholder considerations in their business decisions.  San Francisco has the most Certified Benefit Corporations of any city, and the Bay Area is the home of approximately one quarter of all Certified B Corporations.  San Francisco will be the first U.S. City to provide contracting incentives to these companies, which will further encourage the formation and growth of Benefit Corporations here.

“Contrary to traditional corporations where the maximization of profit is the sole requisite purpose, benefit corporations are required to create a material positive impact on society and the environment,” said Matt Bauer, of BetterWorld Telecom, which is a Benefit Corporation. “We appreciate Supervisor Chiu’s work to pass this legislation, which will help the City and County of San Francisco purchase goods and services from the sorts of businesses that San Francisco should be supporting.”

As originally featured in SustainableIndustries.com by BetterWorld President Matthew Bauer. A three part series: Reading the tea leaves, accepting the inevitable and bringing focus to the most promising sector of our economy. Part One discussed how we got to where we are. Part Two focused on Trends and Facts helping support the shift to a small business-focused economy, Part Three now pulls it all together and discusses concrete solutions for moving forward into the new Access Economy.

All too often we are just looking at the issues in silos and not seeing the opportunity for truly shifting our economy, society and our species’ detrimental and growing impact on the earth’s biosphere. Taking a page from the wisdom of E.O. Wilson, his book, Conscilience, touches brilliantly on a new approach - managing strategy and policy across multiple silos of specialty at the same time.

As both large companies and governments are shrinking their employee rolls, it seems as though the facts and trends we discussed in the second part of this series, combined with a huge focus on strengthening, teaching and supporting smaller, independent, innovative businesses, will reap the greatest payoff  (in cost-benefit terms) and a national economic discussion well overdue for consideration.

So what can we do, right now to support this shift?

Here are some ideas: New Capital and Formation Options for Small/Startup Businesses On April 5, 2012, President Obama signed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act into law.  This bipartisan legislation fulfills the President’s call from last fall to reduce regulatory burdens that prevent many small and young businesses from raising capital – specifically by allowing crowdfunding, expanding mini-public offerings, and creating an “IPO On-Ramp” consistent with important investor protections.

Interestingly, I have read a number of articles pushing fear around this and other proposed instruments making their way through Congress and the SEC as being risky. If I want to invest in my neighbor’s business via one of these new or expanded mechanisms, is that more “risky” than investing in the stock market, which is run now run largely by automated hedge fund algorithms? Michael Shuman, co-founder of Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) and Post Carbon Institute fellow says the critics have it “180 degrees backward.” Shuman acknowledges that the bill is imperfect, but says:

“Jim Hightower says this bill is about ‘deregulating Wall Street.’ In fact, the bill spells the end of Wall Street as we know it. It allows the 99 percent of us who are not wealthy (’unaccredited investors’) to put our money in the local businesses we love, by removing what were once impossibly difficult and expensive legal barriers. Those barriers had been so high, so misconstructed, so poorly targeted against small business and small investors, that they resulted in almost none of our long-term savings - now totalling $30 trillion - going into the local half of our economy. The JOBS Act ends this monopoly for good.”

Kudos to Steve Case and others for spearheading Startup America Partnership, this innovative and impactive public/private partnership is based on a simple premise: young companies that grow, also create jobs. This is exactly the type of ecosystem that we need to spur our most valuable people and companies to start and grow new companies.

Direct Public Offerings (DPOs) are a little known but mature instrument for raising capital for small to medium-sized companies. Think IPO, but on a smaller scale and investors do not have to be accredited. Most states have them and they are SEC sanctioned – the range is roughly $500K to $5M. The question is, why aren’t more companies using DPOs to raise capital? Watch for this one to explode in the coming years. Google “DPO” and your state or call our friends at Cutting Edge Capital in Oakland to find out what the options are in your state.

Here comes the Access Economy
Look no further than the just-issued Fast Company World’s Most Innovative Companies List 2012 to get one great view into the future economy. The companies and organizations here represent connectivity (Facebook, Twitter), sustainability (SolarCity), huge innovation within traditional industries (HBO, Tesla, NFL, SNHU, Square). From Amazon to Square, disintermediation and reduction of friction are the clarion call. New pathways of connecting and learning, and regardless of where you fall on the Occupy Movement, a truly global movement was created in weeks and months, without a defined leader, without a rich backer and without a particular political agenda. These are all products of our Internet Age, our new Biosphere Consciousness (thank you Jeremy Rifkin for the term). Almost every one of the organizations listed was a small startup at some point - the pathway for starting and creating these companies is now much smoother and the pathway to glory simpler. The next decade is going to be extremely interesting.

Location Based Work is a Dinosaur Awaiting Extinction
“…the madness of American transportation leads to only one conclusion: no solution of the transportation puzzle is possible until work and home are put back together.” - Kirkpatrick Sale, Human Scale, 1980

There are huge inefficiencies in how we work - if one were to objectively look at the road miles, time in transit, airline miles and redundant/idle commercial building space currently expended in getting to and from the office, the amount of carbon and cost to business is simply staggering. As it occurred, the transition from industry and manufacturing to our services-based economy did not have the benefit of a mature broadband network that reaches over 85 percent of the households now in our country, wireless and wireless data services that cover even more and business models springing up every day that favor remote work versus the old “factory” mentality.

The number one contributor to carbon and environmental emissions in the U.S. is squarely rooted in how we work. Work-related activity creates over 90 percent of the carbon emissions and pollution in the U.S., with buildings and transportation accounting for almost 75 percent of the total. Roughly 3 percent of the U.S. workforce telecommutes a majority of the time today, but if that number was 50 percent of those who can, we would cut our carbon emissions by 50 percent while saving 453 million barrels of oil and significantly cutting the 2.1 billion hours we waste in traffic jams every year. Essentially, it would be the equivalent of taking 15 million cars off the road.

Change how your organization works today – start from a standpoint of removing location (if you are not retail, restaurant, library, etc.) and then work your way backwards. We will all work this way someday soon, the sooner you start, the sooner you will realize lower costs, higher employee satisfaction, higher productivity and less environmental impact.  For more information, check out our BetterWork Resource Page.

Banking Regulation Changes & Move the Money
Small businesses did not cause the economic meltdown of the past few years, but they are paying a heavy price under the threat of downgraded loans from regulators – which is the excuse many banks now use.  We need to get capital to small businesses, both startup and existing, and all you hear is that banks are afraid of the regulator bogeyman coming in to downgrade any business loan that is not the color of diamonds. Whomever the genius is behind this dynamic please refer to the cause of our recent downturn: securitized real estate investments and greed - all centered around Wall Street, not Main Street.

Also, let’s change the access to capital rules. We need to get away from the asset-based lending rules and start angling towards a more realistic structure based on novel ideas such as track record and profitability, and wake up to the fact that we are now a service economy. This change is only inevitable as we continuously shift towards a services-based economy and as real estate becomes less important for non-storefront businesses.

Buy Local, Be Local
Personal: Buy local, be local – COMMIT NOW to shifting 10 percent of your purchasing as a business, non-profit and/or personally to local independent businesses, this creates more jobs, increased community wealth and, well, it’s a lot more fun to shop or eat at a place that’s not run by the global machinery. By localizing our manufacturing and food resources, the impacts are far and wide - huge economic growth and mitigation of the environmental impact of food and manufacturing miles. Seek out the Buy Local network in your community, and get involved, sign your business up as a member/supporter and start to hear the sucking sound of community wealth dissipate. For more information on all fronts local, check out http://www.LivingEconomies.org, which is the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE).
Policy: City governments need to get their political and common sense heads on straight, point your budgets and spending at local firms - just do it! If you can’t find a suitable local option, then farm it out or legislate this. This is probably the largest shift a community can make towards keeping dollars circulating in the community.
Public/Community Banking:  Cities should move their money to a municipal bank (check out this recent piece in the WSJ), which will keep more money in the community and fund projects others in the community can then follow. Remember the multiplier affect…this one should be a no brainer.

The End
There’s nothing stopping us now and there is too much momentum to turn back. Let’s make this the point, the juncture where we decide to increase wealth in our communities, to truly tap and expand our entrepreneurial hard wiring, and to increase ownership of business in communities all across the country. It will take effort at all local levels, and in state and federal public/private partnership, but the examples are growing and catalyzing. As a society, we spend so much time railing at the politicians and those in “power,” when in truth the field is ready for transformation. Whether starting a business, focusing on buying local, or transforming your workplace, the conditions have never been more ripe than now. The keys to the Access Economy are well within our reach, we need to start taking these pathways and creating a new manifestation of the global economy, one where the money, power and ownership are distributed via interconnected, intelligent virtual and physical communities.

For centuries, the decisions made by the few with the money and the power dictate the priorities of their government and the stories in the media, and they determine the lives and opportunities of their citizens. There is now something bigger. The people of the world see each other and can protect each other. It’s turning the system upside down and it changes everything. Massive change and transformation is underway, our Biosphere Consciousness is forming. Seize the moment and get on board!

As originally featured in SustainableIndustries.com by BetterWorld President Matthew Bauer.

A three part series: Reading the tea leaves, accepting the inevitable and bringing focus to the most promising sector of our economy.

For eons, civilization on Earth evolved slowly, innovation and change took place over decades and centuries, until the past few hundred years. Suddenly, an explosion of invention and progress gave society airplanes, cars, global wars, computers, skyscrapers, the Internet, global movement of goods and money, beauty, opportunity and destruction on a level never imagined. For the first time since we pulled our knuckles off the ground, humanity had gotten way out ahead of itself. So who could blame us for buying into the religion of growth for growth’s sake, materialism, globalization and all the ensuing collateral damage.

As this tsunami of advancement began to hit the shore in various forms, the subsequent growing pileup has awakened many to the realities of the positives and negatives of our two-century epoch. In the movie The Matrix, Morpheus offers Neo a choice between the blue pill or the red pill – blissful ignorance of illusion (blue) or embracing the sometimes painful truth of reality (red). Neo chooses red pill and all the pain of reality that goes with it, but also opens himself up to the beauty of possibility.

Our global, one-size-fits-all economy is becoming increasingly outmoded, and with the red pill now making its way into society’s bloodstream, there’s no turning back. As we begin to awake from our hangover and face the reality of recent years, we feel a pull toward something new and different. All around us there is an undercurrent that is slowly but surely transforming the nature and structure of business. It is driven by a cultural shift that seeks greater connection and creativity, living wage jobs, more sustainable lifestyles, empowerment and ownership, and owes much to our newly installed and exponentially growing biosphere connector – the Internet.

Since we’ve taken the red pill, we need to begin by shifting our thinking. Instead of focusing on the bad news as is de rigueur these days, let’s set our sights on the positive currents of our time.

Change is occurring in so many corners of industry – across varied communities, organizations and diverse verticals – it’s everywhere you look. It is visible in the dynamics around the new Access Economy, the disintermediation occurring in every sector, and the “Buy Local – Be Local” initiatives found from Charleston toSeattle. It can also be seen in the resurgence in local banking and a growing multitude of alternative investment instruments. These changes go hand-in-hand with the new wave of creative knowledge and remote workers enabled by the Internet – our relatively new global biosphere network – where over 10 percent of the world’s population is now on broadband in less than 20 years of commercial Internet growth. The list continues to grow, as entrepreneurs find new and innovative ways around the thousand-car pileup otherwise known as our current national economy.  You can liken it to the recovery in nature, how it organizes itself and rebirths after a forest fire, volcanic eruption, or hurricane.

Kirkpatrick Sale’s seminal work, Human Scale, is now over 30 years old, but has never been more valuable in its application to the many systems that drive America, from transportation to education to business. Sale walks through almost every major human-invented system on the planet, from governments, to schools, communities, businesses and even streetscapes, and concludes that each has a breaking point, and that size does matter.

But in this case, running contrary to the big is beautiful mindset, each system has a breaking point and when that is passed, its effectiveness diminishes proportionately as it grows in size. The big box, global corporation cowboys argue that WalMart is more efficient, for example, than many local farmers serving their goods through local stores. When you add up the underlying data and impacts, the ramifications are, in fact, disastrous for communities, our health, the middle class, and on and on. The result is low-wage jobs, lack of ownership and empowerment, decreased food quality and safety, loss of community dollars and loss of Main Street. The point here is that it does not need to be an absolute, but clearly a rebalancing back towards small business is in order, and is on the way.

Small business accounts for roughly one-third of our economy. Firms with less than 100 people account for 99 percent of the companies in the US, 30 percent of the jobs, and 21 percent of the revenue [see How Important is Small Business to the U.S. infographic for details and sources].

However, the number of startups and small firms relative to the overall percentage of full time jobs has been on the decline over the past 20 years. As our economy has further transitioned from manufacturing to services [see Number of Establishments Gaining Jobschart], jobs have been flowing to firms with over 250 employees [Chart 7].

This phenomenon is proportional to the meteoric rise and over-development of big box stores throughout the 80s, 90s, and 00s – which, in turn, led to the  destruction of many Main Street businesses. We can also look to the latter part of this past decade when, during the economic collapse, funds dried up for small businesses, both startup and continuity/growth capital.

This phenomenon is proportional to the meteoric rise and over-development of big box stores throughout the 80s, 90s, and 00s – which, in turn, led to the  destruction of many Main Street businesses. We can also look to the latter part of this past decade when, during the economic collapse, funds dried up for small businesses, both startup and continuity/growth capital.

From a funding perspective, the average small business has approximately $1.3M in annual revenues, which falls into the lower end of the most inefficient funding category in the US business sector today. For companies in the $1M - $5M range, securing growth capital from either bank or equity funding is next to impossible. Even after signing over every possible asset, the financial bar keeps rising higher. This resulting squeeze is not the fault of Main Street or small businesses, but they are left holding the bag, caught in the double whammy of keeping the doors open and trying not to lay off staff, while being told that regulators have tightened the noose and banks don’t want “questionable” loans on their books.

This leaves the equity players in this category with too few assets for bank loans nowhere to go. These companies want to hire and expand but the access to capital is just not there.  This spotlights the outmoded thinking in our economy, and regulators need to wake up to the fact that we are evolving from an asset-based economy. Loans and lines of credit need to transition from houses, cars, buildings, or machines, to track records, profitability, and management teams. This trend is not going away, so laws and rules need to be adjusted.

On the horizon, though, hope springs eternal with Millenials and Gen Y’ers. A recent Inc. Magazine article, showed that of 872 people aged 18 to 34 surveyed about entrepreneurship, 54 percent said they either want to start a business or have already started one. The entrepreneurial spirit is a common theme that binds America and we need to consciously feed this spirit, adjust our thinking, laws and regulations and bolster the next generation. Think of this as the greatest opportunity for our country to stay competitive in the world. What do we have to lose?

The next part in this series will focus on a selection of facts and trends that all point to a inevitable tipping point where small business emerges to become an organizing principle of the new economy.

Also, startups (which typically begin as small businesses) create a constant and large number of new jobs in the US – new firms add a 3M jobs per year, old firms lose 1M (see Job Growth in U.S.  Driven Entirely by Startups, a study from the Kansas City-based  Kauffman Foundation).

Excerpted from BetterWorld Insights Newsletter.

Happy New Year!

Delancey Street Donation
On behalf of our customers, we’re celebrating this holiday season with a donation to the Delancey Street Foundation. Now in it’s 40th yr., Delancey is a community where people with nowhere to turn, turn their lives around. If every community had a Delancey Street it would truly be a BetterWorld.

BetterWorld Makes 2011 Inc. 500|5000
As 2011 comes to a close, we’d like to send a big shout out to you, our customers, who helped BetterWorld Telecom become the 3,531st fastest growing private company in the U.S.  BetterWorld and the other companies on this year’s list created 350K jobs over the past 3 years, and economic stimulus of 366B.

BetterWorld has teamed up with SalesForce.com to roll out their new industry-leading Customer Service Portal. This new online service center will be available to all BetterWorld customers by the end of the first quarter of 2012.

New Streamline CARE Features Include:

• Submit & Manage Trouble Tickets - Access to online trouble ticket creation and status
• Social Media Options -  Ability to submit tickets and connect with BetterWorld via Twitter
• Contact Info & Services - Ability to update key account data and manage your BetterWorld services

Net Neutrality
A free and open Internet is critical to modern society and business.  However,  large companies that own the highways of the Internet are seeking to centralize and control the content & put up toll booths.  This would follow the same pattern as telephony, movies, radio & TV and other media.  At BetterWorld Telecom, we support a free and open Internet with equal access for all, where innovation can thrive and are taking net neutrality up as one of our causes in 2012. Stay tuned for the first event of the BetterWorld Forum series, which will be held this January in San Francisco.

Telecom for Non-profits
BetterWorld donated 1000’s of phones to non-profits in 2011.  The BetterWorld - TechSoup program offers donations and discounts to U.S. non-profits. Now that’s Telecom for Good.

FishWise Case Study

BetterWorld in the Media
New Video - Our Customers and Partners speak out

BetterWorld featured on The Wendel Forum

“Keep the Internet Free and Open” by BetterWorld Pres in TheHill.com

New Resource Library
Make the most of your BetterWorld voice and data services with our Online Resource Center. From hardware to services, this is your one-stop for all information on BetterWorld Solutions.

Announcing the BetterWorld Bike Team 2012 - Stay tuned for more info & schedule.

We were thrilled to receive this review from one of our newest TechSoup Global nonprofit customers, FishWise:

FishWise provides innovative market-based tools to the seafood industry, enabling consumers and grocery retailers to support marine conservation through their seafood purchasing decisions.

Letter from Fishwise:

I was hired to organize a growing non-profit office of eight. They had only two phone lines from AT&T, and an inexpensive 2-line phone with 8 cordless extensions. Only two calls could happen at once, and one shared voice mail in box. They needed a new communication solution!

Well-informed friends also told me to give VoIP a fair chance because technology, and faster Internet speeds might have made it a viable solution.

My further study made me realize that VoIP might not merely be an acceptable alternative; it might bring some advantages.  Not one to make long-term technology decisions (or spending decisions) lightly, I did my homework.  I spent three months once or twice a week reading as many reviews as I could find about all the various VoIP/virtual PBX providers, I found a confusing mix of raves and rants for virtually every company.  (I soon confirmed that moving on trying to find the company with no negative reviews was futile, and that, probably, they did not reflect a consensus; I also noted that many complaints had to do with high-call-volume users, and our small non-profit has light phone traffic.)

Once I decided VoIP was the answer, I began searching for Cisco phones because I believe they are the best. I looked for refurbished phones, and second hand phones on craigslist, but then remembered TechSoup also had hardware deals, and voila! I found BetterWorld! Not only did they work with Cisco phones, but the were FREE through TechSoup!!! We also applied for the CA Teleconnect Fund (CTF) financial assistance which will reduce our monthly bill in half, and are waiting for acceptance. Suddenly VoIP was going save us money, as well as be a better flexible solution for communication.

Understanding the technology is key for successful transition to VoIP.  I recommend anyone that is going to use a hosted PBX solution for your business to analyze there broadband needs prior to implementing any internet based phone solution.  Bandwidth is key, and if you have lots of PCs and Phones on the same network you could at any time saturate the network causing packet loss which will result in poor call quality.  We already had a fast internet connection, but all of our iMacs were connected wirelessly.

In preparation for the new phones, I had the office wired with CAT6, two lines going to every station, one for data (iMac), and one for voice (VoIP). I also added a 24-port Gigabit switch with QoS, giving the VoIP ports priority over the data. Running the new cable was the biggest cost, but it was a one time expense, and added to the functionality of the office beyond the phones. Plus, we saved so much on the FREE Cisco phones, the cost was somewhat deferred.

BetterWorld made the transition seamless. We are amazed with the features and flexibility, but customer service has been the strongest advantage. I am not an IT professional, just willing to make mistakes, and ask for help. Ali’s assistance with training, porting our old number, and fielding my questions was impeccable. BetterWorld did an outstanding job, but understanding the needs of a VoIP system is key in allowing them to do their best work.

We are very surprised with the call quality, its actually better than our old land lines.  We now all have our own extensions, so, we can pick up the phone, and make calls whenever we want! Having voice mail for every employee seems like such a luxury. We love being able to transfer calls to any phone, and to use follow-me settings to receive calls anywhere. The ability to forward voice mails via email to another coworker is so super-geeky cool!

A huge THANK YOU to BetterWorld for bringing this office up to speed.

Cheers!

A Happy BetterWorld Customer