Mary was in the midst of writing an essay on business principles when she passed away. These are the seven core principles.

  • 1. Corporate goals should not be revenue and profit.

    These are means to an end—not effective goals.  Corporate goals should be to enable a team of individuals to be employed doing what they want to do in a sustainable way.  

  • 2. Choose goals by considering what significant problems your team is best suited to solve.

    Choose corporate goals by matching the capabilities of your team to significant issues that drive employees on a mission, such as addressing climate change, excessive population growth, energy limitations, or space exploration. 

  • 3. Set up employee ownership.

    Corporations based on revenue and profit create large disparities in wealth that lead to unrest. Employee ownership addresses this issue and can lead to significantly more uniform distribution of wealth, creating a more effective and efficient corporate engine.

  • 4. Maintain openness and equity in rewards.

    Creating an environment of openness and equity aligns the energy of all the employees toward the mission and eliminates internal competition and wasteful friction between employees.

  • 5. Minimize corporate rules.

    Minimizing corporate rules stimulates the independence of individuals, which, in turn, stimulates creative solutions enabling progress toward goals and resolution of problems.

  • 6. Show confidence in each individual. 

    It is important to show confidence in each individual. Set up corporate structure with the assumption that your employees will succeed and will solve the problem.  An individual’s self-confidence is a strong contributor to his/her ability to achieve.  The corporation, educator, or parent influences this confidence through the way they supervise the individual.

  • 7. Incorporate hands-on work, as it greatly increases an individual’s ability to invent a new solution.

    It is important not to isolate employees or students from the physical world realization of the problems they are addressing. This theme is an encouragement to have space to prototype and build as well as try solutions. Employees in a more theoretical role should mix with individuals in a manual role to achieve strong teaming and creative solutions.