Motivation

Mark Twain ones said: “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you know why”. So that is a purpose question. The search for an answer to this ‘question’ brought me, during one of my many research journeys, to the following insight of Daniel Dennett: “Find something more important than yourselves and dedicate your life to it”. I thought: when I find this ‘import thing to do’, I know the answer to the quest for a meaningful life.

For me, it is obvious that, during the Industrial Revolution, we doubled our standard of living every thirty years. But we ‘all know’ that, at this moment, prosperity is not produced in a sustainable way for most of the people. We consume more wealth than we are entitled to, given our productivity growth. To survive as a specie we should organize a broader and more sustainable prosperity. The situation that our prosperity is not sustainable, is illustrated by: the need for continuous economic growth, the debt problem (2008), climate refugees, unequal distribution of work, income and assets (Thomas Piketty), the depletion of scarce resources, corona pandemic (2020), climate change (global warming) and finally low productivity growth in relation to our prosperity costs (healthcare, education and safety).

These potentially disruptive developments are related to each other and I summarize these problems as a prosperity problem or better: ‘our not so sustainable-prosperity problem’. I believe in our human ability to solve this problem and organize and affordable and ultimately sustainable prosperity.

Growth and development are not the same. Growth is the process of increasing in size, development is the process in which someone or something grows or changes and becomes more advanced. We need less growth and more development

So that’s why I founded the Weconomics Foundation. Weconomics facilitates the transformation to a broader and more sustainable prosperity. It is a network of pioneers, entrepreneurs and professionals who contribute independently and together, to the sustainability of our prosperity. The core in this development is the combination and deployment of new business- and operating models and data technologies such as Internet of Things, blockchain and Artificial Intelligence.

In the context of the ‘roaring twenties’ of the twenty-first century we need new organization models to reduce waste and organize the work of office workers in order to improve their productivity so they can contribute to a more sustainable prosperity. The digital assembly line is one of the most promising organizational concepts to support this idea.

So basically, my motivation for my work is our future, and our future is where our children live.

“As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world – that is the myth of the atomic age – as in being able to remake ourselves.” (Mahatma Gandhi)