I recently gave a talk at the amazing Temporary School in Mayfair. It's housed in a traditional Mayfair mansion which hasn't been used for 15 years or so. The silk wallpaper is still there but not the the heating.

The initial idea was to talk about business from a non-traditional viewpoint based on my experience of running a company that wasn't primarily about the money.

Searching for a title, I came up with "Setting up a Post-Capitalist Enterprise - Unlearning Capitalism". And spent the following few days really looking into it. And it moved my thinking forward unexpectedly - and the talk was more about the whole context for business and why we need a better one - than about the nuts and bolts of a start-up.

The most useful book was "Beyond Civilisation - Humanity's Next Great Adventure" by Daniel Quinn (who wrote Ishmael). It really helped to define a kind of line that needs to be drawn between the way our civilisation is barely functional in terms of people and the planet - and where we could go as a species.

The other area that helped was the perspective of how long we've been around and how we are the product of a lot of hard work on the part of something. And that we have just got here. If you compare the 4 billion year history of the Earth to a 40 year old human, the Industrial Revolution started 2 minutes ago!

Hope you enjoy the talk - also the content is being set up in the qWiki - a sort of structured Wiki with the juicy bits from the talk!