SOCAP11 Panelist Spotlight: Gil Friend, Natural Logic, Inc.

What is your role in the Social Capital Market?
Strategic advisory to companies and investors
How can the green movement progress from simply eliminating harm to adding value?
Most rewarding: the accelerating uptake (even in some corporate circles) of key ideas like the dependence of the human economy on the living economy, and the necessity of systemic solutions in a world in which everything is connected to everything else.
I used to think the biggest challenge would be accommodating the resource impact of raising the bottom of the pyramid. Lately I think it may be the recalcitrance of the US — which could lead this transition, but doesn’t seen to want to.
What does Money + Meaning = to you? What should the social capital market stand for?
M+M means inverting the Friedmanesque catechism that profit is the purpose of business with the truth that profit is the consequence of business well done, that it’s a useful way of keeping score, that it’s a necessary cost of doing business (paying for the use of capital, much as business has to pay for use other resources) — but not its purpose. Money + Meaning can nurture each other; the dance of Money + Meaning is what the social capital market can stand for.