What if money was a wrong measure of success ?

Richard Jefferson, Social Entrepreneur, Cambia, started our typical Davos dinner discussion by a very challenging question. What if money was not the right measure of success ? What if we had all been thinking using the wrong referential ?

I should say most of us ended the dinner with more questions than answers with such an introduction. Think about why money and profits have become the measure of success. Why do we need them ? Well, probably to feel good in a very broad sense, from basic health and food to leisure.

Now you may ask yourself what is it exactly to feel good ? Well if you think about it more, it has nothing to do with money.

Richard Jefferson took the example of the evolution of music over the centuries. All the great musicians such as Mozart were creating their music in an open source way as they shared with everybody the way it was written. The profit business model has make the music industry evolve into a very closed industry where copyrights prevent most of the sharing. What is interesting is that technology takes it back to an open model where people share music again, software like garage band makes it extremely easy even for kids to produce music.

Richard believes that money made is the wrong metrics, our referential is wrong, we should be all focusing on what it is to build another model where people focus on feeling good, not profits.

If you look at open source models such as sourceforge or wikipedia, thousands of people build software or the best encyclopedia in the world not focusing on profits, they focus on recognition and that recognition makes them feel good, it has nothing to do with profits.

If you think about these models as a money being a wrong measure of success, you may ask yourself how to measure one's contribution in a community, which is not always easy.

Richard Jefferson is building Bioforge, an open source initiative to "develop and validate new platforms for cooperative invention, improvement and delivery of biological technologies within a dynamic 'protected commons' ". Open source models are now growing outside of the software industry and Richard is a firm believer that they are a credible alternative model to profit driven models, which does not prevent people and companies to generate profits around them, keeping the core open source.

Richard says "Open source is not about public domain, but about behaviour. Take everything we did, but share nicely." Richard thinks that these recognition based models may become more important than profit based models when enough people understand them and contribute.

At the end of the dinner, we had an interesting discussiong with Google's co-founder Sergei Brin, John Battelle (Battellemedia) and Olivier Samwer (Jamba!) about open source and Google. This is one obvious limit of open source, if you open source the google ranking algorythm, everybody would cheat it.

Sergey Brin told me that you don't want to open source everything anyway and quoted the idea of open sourcing a nuclear power plant system... Frightening.

Please comment on the World Economic Forum Blog.

Comments

[joe]

Defining success is a difficult task. Most people equate it with wealth, power, and happiness. But true success is not a thing you acquire or achieve. Rather, it is a journey you take your whole life long.
Success is not limited to those with financial resources or special talents. It is available to anyone willing to learn a few practical principles and then follow through with them day to day.”

Whit Hobbs, who wrote, “Success is waking up in the morning, whoever you are, wherever you are, however old or young, and bounding out of bed because there’s something out their that you love to do, that you believe in, that you’re good at – something that’s bigger than you are, and you can hardly wait to get at it again today.”

[John Rif]

Money is not the rigth meassure of success.
Im the CEO of a newly startet company. When you have average people, which is about 99 % of the population, equality becomes more important as motivation. Secondly people are more happy, and happy people make better decisions.
I could have continued for several pages.
Yours sincerely
John Rif

[Afro-Netizen]

Address the wealth gap and white-skin privilege first. Once you've solved that, then let's talk about non-monetary utopia -- maybe.

[Aman Allah Khan]

"Richard Jefferson took the example of the evolution of music over the centuries.All the great musicians such as Mozart were creating their music in an open source way as they shared with everybody the way it was written."

Mozart worked under contracts, spends a great deal of time looking for patrons and positions in most European courts, and made a living out of commissions and special orders. The rest of the time, the poor genius was starving, or subsisting out of piano lessons to kids in better off families.

For which he was - dig that - paid (yeah, with that evil worthless money, which he was - dig that - very eager to receive for his services)

As for the highly idealized vision you have of the "music industry" at the time, I'm afraid that idea of a great collective hug between musicians sharing their turf is even more ridiculous (i.e.: tell that to Salieri for instance)

I'd say using all of this as an example of 'money won't make you happy' and 'let's just all give away the fruits of our efforts' doesn't help your 'cause' really - or in fact, rather confirms what I thought of it.

The biggest problem I have with all this so called 'open source' and 'social entrepreneurship' trendy story of our times, is your messianic and absolutist mindset.
Indeed, in my book this spells pretty badly: it means you know your model can't stand unless everybody is brought into submission (sorry, I meant "fully agree to follow it" of course).

If it wasn't so, then you wouldn't be so upset with the existing model and could live and thrive next to it, would you? If it was indeed so superior, as you claim – or at least suggest – it is, then you wouldn’t fear competition.

That sort of mental schema has a name: it's called utopia (which in turns explains your messianic attitude by the way), and the reason why it spells so bad in my book, is that the XXth century was a vibrant demonstration of the damages and tragedies suffered by any given society (Germany, Russia, China, Cambodia...) when idealists start talking about “how to measure one's contribution in a community” (in your own words), and decree that, no, finally our ancestors and most of our contemporary are wrong: money is not the measure (and the financial markets are evil, and all this consumerism is a plot of the oppressors, etc, etc.). In short, when some men forced their utopia on reality (and over their fellow men, incidentally).

Since there’s a direct relation, I was wondering: you think the monetary system (as in “a convenient way to materialize the value of things) is bad, so what’s your stand on private property?

"What is interesting is that technology takes it back to an open model where people share music again, software like garage band makes it extremely easy even for kids to produce music."

Ah but then, you've lost the point of your argument. Software, in that respect is tantamount to Mozart's harpsichord, but certainly not to the actual creation he used it for.
Then again, I frequently noticed that it takes an artist to fully understand the difference between the tool and the creativity. Other people usually assume that having the former will give you the later (it doesn’t, of course) - and this is the reason why, when most people see a great photograph, they ask what camera what used as if it was the determining factor, no matter the talent – or lack of - of the guy who aimed and shot the picture.

Looks like you're making the same mistake.

Generally speaking, it would be okay (you’re entitled to your own flawed interpretations of the world, just like the rest of us) if only you weren't trying to promote this 'non-business model' of yours out of this mistake.

To sum up:
Richard says "Open source is not about public domain, but about behaviour. Take everything we did, but share nicely."

Fine for Richard, but what if I, as an artist/musician/scientist/whatever-creator decide that I don’t want to give ‘everything I did’ (and even just parts actually) no matter if it will be shared ‘nicely’ or not? Who is Richard (and who are you) to tell me I’m wrong?

Answers to that question will actually define your stand on private property (though I admit the term is a bit redundant, as property is necessarily private – there’s no such thing as ‘public’ property) because that’s precisely what it’s about here: property is a right of exclusion, first and foremost. It means ”this is mine, and I’ll share it –or not – with whoever I want. Or not.”

[Olivier - Quotidien Durable .Com]

Yes !
Thanks for this post.
Elizabeth Laville, in 'L'entreprise Verte' says that money should not be the goal of a company but its fuel.
You definitely need to have fuel when you are driving from Paris to Milano. But just don't forget that your target in Milano.

[harepeace]

as it turns ou, everything that happens is based on the motives that drive the behaviours.

if money is the only motive, then the behaviours/results can be quite negative.

it would appear that now that goo-goo is just another handful of stock markp FraUD billyonerrors themselves, the 'ranking' of search results is always based on paid advertisements?

tuxedos aside, free software would appear to be a way of rebalancing things so that just folks can operate with the same tools (at least on the 'net) as the self-appointed greed/fear/ego based manipulators/controllers of yOUR cyber trade routes (?the last frontier?).

consult with/trust in yOUR creators, working (without any distracting personal gain motives) to help keep us alive, & to disempower unprecedented evile, since/until forever. see you there?