(Note: -- indicates participant, all panelist comments noted by initials. See part 1 to learn who's who.)

RL: Two interesting network emerging. BALLE - the Business Alliance for Living Local Economies - that Doug helped found - and NESEA-RI, the Rhode Island chapter of the North East Sustainable Energy Association, that meets once a month at the Everyman Bistro.

What are some must-read or key websites for you?

JA: I read Kunstler years ago, but I started to get sick of the doom and gloom. So I got away from those kind of books, but David Orr's Down to the Wire got me back to it.

Orr thinks that climate change is all about politics. He's very hard on optimists like me. So after that reading I needed something positive. So I went back to Stuart Brand Whole Earth Discipline.

Whole Earth Catalog, there's a now famous sentence: We are as gods. We might as well good at it. This new book says We HAVE to get good at it.

Brand says politics is not enough. There are 4 things we need to do to reach the future.

1. Greening of the cities - by 2050 that's where 80% of the population will live
2. Nuclear power - a new generation of nuclear power has to be part of the mix (no idea if I agree)
3. Biotechnology to feed the world
4. Geotechnology to reverse climate change

This is anathema to most environmentalist.

Chris Martenson's Crash Course

1491 by Charles Mann - a look at the America's just before Columbus

DH: Age of the Unthinkable by Joshua Cooper Ramo

Also, Biomimicry - Janine Benyus - looks at the way nature provides products and services. We can find models for our economy by looking at the way that nature provides those same services or products.

Daniel Goldman - The Age of Ecological Intelligence - more problems than solutions, but a good read.

Also, we're reading a lot of children's stories, not for grandkids, but because someone in the house is getting a Master's Degree in Linguistics.

Now Robert's pitching Providence & Beyond featuring Doug Hammond next week at the New Commons studio. You could check it out, I guess.

Open Discussion

-- What are the mechanics of an employee-run company. We want to move to an ESOP model. We can easily make decisions with 5 people, but...

JA: (Tosses his book, The Companies We Keep, to the participant.)

-- I'm 39. I've lived in RI my whole life and worked in juvenile corrections for 17 years. What is stopping RI from thinking beyond its borders? If I said "social enterprise" to my colleagues, they'd walk away.

RL: There's an energy in Providence that's animated by people who CHOOSE to move here. People who have "shopped for cities" are choosing Providence.

JA: As I travel, wherever I go, people say the same thing? RI is not that special. I live in a place with 6 tiny towns on a tiny island, and we have the same issues. In places that have vitality or are becoming vital, there is greater passion from the newcomers than the 'locals'.

Redundancy is wasteful, but there's an even greater fear of a place losing its character.

The Social Purpose Business roundtable doesn't have a table. And it's not particularly round, more oblong or even amorphous. Be that as it may...

Robert Leaver of New Commons is moderating a discussion with John Abrams of South Mountain Company (SoMoCo) and Doug Hammond of Alive Communities.

Question: From your experience, what business building tools and practices are effective, e.g., the worker owned business coop of South Mountain?

JA: When we made SoMoCo a cooperative, we've always been a very collegial group, but this year has been a great challenge. I started to wonder what kind of dynamic would emerge, but it was not a problem. We found out we're a pretty hearty, dependable group.

There are about 8 or 9 million people working in employee-owned companies, but many of them are not particularly democratic, especially ESOPs

Mondragon and the steel workers are cooperating to create a new kind of employee owned manufacturing business. This could have a huge impact.

RL: Could you describe the decision making situation.

JA: We have a scale of pay based on seniority and skill, but the range is much smaller than most companies. Corporate average is about 400-to-1, ours is about 5-to-1.

All the strategic decisions are made by all owner consensus. If we can't find consensus, we have a super-majority voting structure as a backup. We've had 3 votes in 22 years. In each case, the opposition was very small, so it was almost a consensus.

Consensus ensures that issues get vetted and it prevents the situation where 49% of the people are dissatisfied.

DH: There's a new collaborative operational model that's not the same as a cooperative model. I've met a lot of social entrepreneurs that are currently untethered from their projects - they're running on their own - and they want to work, but they don't want to be tethered to an organization. It's not a B Corp, we don't know what it is. We're on the verge of trying to understand what we're doing. Artists do this all the time, but not business people. We need enough freedom to create change, but enough support to get the job done.

JA: There's an area in Italy where hundreds of cooperatives are joining to compete with multinational corporations. The local governments are strong, left wing, business oriented. Those words don't go together very often.

RL: What are B Corps?

DH: Its a kind of corporation that reaches certain targets in certain aspects of their business. The government will recognize the social and environmental value of the corporation. It's not a legal entity yet, it's a concept and an emerging set of practices. Basically, it says that financial performance is not the only bottom line.

Go to the B Corp website and you can do a self-assessment. http://www.bcorporation.net

RL: LC3 or L3C it's a state recognize low-profit LLC that generate a consciously slow and modest profit. Only a few states have this, notably Vermont. Because you're not maximizing profits, you're not maximizing tax revenues, so states are wary.

DH: As businesses moved along the improvement of practice and process, they surpasses the non-profit world. The non-profits are lagging. Right now, it's really important for non-profits to find these B Corp standards and implement them.

Participant: It sounds like what 6 Sigma did in manufacturing.

DH: Very much.

RL: Any other revolutionary business practices at SoMoCo?

JA: Not really revolutionary, but there's a structure for what we do with profits. 15% is donated, mostly locally. 35% is split between all the owners. The other half is equity that is backed up by and investment corporation. We're committed to maintain 50% owners equity as cash. It's fundamental that people KNOW their retirement money is there.

The other big thing we do is our commitment to maintain a predefined level of profitability. There's a real sense that our first responsibility is full-time, better than living wage jobs for everybody at SoMoCo. Our second responsibility is to our community.

DH: I think we're at an inflection point. My oldest daughter was graduating from a fairly conservative college. She handed me a statement on her graduation day. It was a corporate responsibility pledge the student put together - that all the places they would work in their lives would meet these responsibilities. Those who took the pledge would wear green tassels. 87% of the students had green tassels.

There's now an expectation and a mandate for corporate responsibility.

My most sincere apologies to the entire SERI Summit community. I have utterly failed in my blogging responsibilities. And not for lack of trying. Really, it was a lack of taking my own advice.

They always teach you with these computer boxes that you should save your work, early and often. Well, I didn't. And more's the pity. A solid 2,000 words gone with an accidental click of the mouse.

In my inimitable style, I waited until the session was almost over to obliterate my work.

So, one more time, so sorry. Session 2 is starting.

And I promise to save. Early and often.