The founder's thesis
Business with a Human Imperative
A business that operates with a human imperative assumes that prosperity means more than growth or profit. It recognizes its place in the communities it affects — its customers, the places the work touches, and the world at large — and stewards all of those relationships; it acknowledges its own impact and takes responsibility to minimize and mitigate that impact; and it seeks enough to be successful without extracting everything it can from its customers, employees, or environment.
By keeping three commitments — sufficiency, accountability and stewardship — a business that operates with a human imperative can prosper without someone else carrying the cost.
Sufficiency
Profit is never at the expense of others.
- Take only what the work requires.
- Profit should be earned, not extracted.
- Growth is necessary and intentional — never maximized.
- Charge what the business needs, not what the customer will bear.
Accountability
Actions have costs. Costs affect more than just a spreadsheet. And nothing is actually free. A business has a responsibility to own and disclose hidden costs and impacts.
- Businesses have a responsibility to justify the cost of their actions.
- The whole cost, to their local, regional, and global community: impact on resources (physical and digital), on people (employees, neighbors, customers, everyone downstream), on the environment, on their own industry, and on the future.
- Businesses must minimize and mitigate those costs where possible.
- Businesses must disclose those costs and impacts, withholding only what is genuinely proprietary.
- Those costs are long-reaching and almost never surfaced.
Stewardship
A business owes an element of stewardship of the communities it affects: the global community impacted by its activities; the regional communities behind the resources making the work possible; and the community of its own customers.
- A business must treat its customers as people, and respect them as humans with personal agency.
- A business must return ownership to the people who pay for its products, to the greatest extent possible.
- A business must give people as much agency as it can — over the way the product is used, over the time it gives back to them, and of self over product: personal data, privacy.
- A business should enable customers to build community around the products.
- A business should share what helps everyone; protect what differentiates.
- A business builds trust through transparency, setting proper expectations, and following through — and this sets the tone for reciprocity.
What follows
The three commitments reinforce each other: each makes the others easier to keep, and together they return more than one alone.
Accountability and active stewardship lead to customer loyalty and reciprocity. A business that treats customers as people, that gives customers a sense of ownership and that does not try to extract maximum value from its customers will create loyalty on merit. Customers who are loyal on merit are more patient and forgiving when something doesn't go perfectly. Those customers will reciprocate through testimony and community support. That business will earn a reputation for trust.
A reputation for trust proves its worth when customers are forced to look for alternatives. Events that push people away from a business they relied on keep happening — a security breach, values quietly abandoned, political sentiment, some other broken trust — and when such an event happens, people look for an alternative they already trust. Trust isn't a feeling you can market into existence. A business already known to be trustworthy is the one available for the switch.
Sufficiency is what makes this possible. The owners of the business maintain independence and autonomy. A business that needs less owes less, and never has to grow simply to service what it has borrowed. Nobody else's need for growth gets to make decisions. That business can stay true to its mission and values, can maintain proper stewardship, can earn and maintain its reputation for trust, and can be properly positioned when customers look for a trusted alternative to a business that does not follow these principles.
A business operating on sufficiency, accountability, and stewardship can prosper without someone else carrying the cost — and when the forcing events come, when the customers look for an alternative they can trust, it is the option already standing.
Even if no forcing event occurs, a business with accountability and stewardship that operates on a principle of sufficiency has time and room to grow without compromising its values — and stands as proof that another path exists for founders beyond selling ownership and giving up control to grow it.
Business with a Human Imperative means that sometimes it really is OK to leave money on the floor, if everyone goes home on time and sleeps easy and gets to spend the evening with their family.
This is the claim. The Experiment is what the company does with it.