Praxis Reads // Fall 2019
Our short takes on readings and listenings from the Praxis community.
Every so often, we use this space to draw your attention to recent publications that have caught our eyes and been the source of sustained conversation within the Praxis team. This month, we have four such pieces: a substantial piece analyzing the on-again, off-again IPO for WeWork; a recently-published short but powerful book on the attention economy; a fascinating new book from a Praxis Fellow highlighting the power of “redemptive friendships”; and a piece on the notion of “the commander’s intent” within the faith and work movement, authored by another active member of the Praxis community.
First off is “Why WeWork Won’t,” a lengthy but rewarding piece from the Harvard Business School on the global real estate unicorn. While much attention has rightly been given to the ups and downs of WeWork’s efforts to IPO, less attention has been given to the underlying business model of this most modern of companies. In taking a long look at WeWork’s financials, HBS faculty members Nori Gerardo Lietz and Sean Bracken call attention to the difficulties facing companies insisting upon positioning themselves as “asset light” when, in fact, they are susceptible to fluctuations in markets tied directly to the commercial real estate “hard assets” at the center of their balance sheets. While the analysis they provide is interesting in its own right, the ongoing struggle to properly value companies like WeWork is likely to continue.
Given our sustained interest in the ways new communication technologies are shaping not just our personal habits but the social environment itself, we were pleased to find a concise account of the new attention economy in James Williams’ Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy. Williams, a former Google employee and recent Oxford PhD in Philosophy, gives language to something many of us experience but struggle to articulate. “At its best,” he says, “technology opens our doors of perception, inspires awe and wonder in us, and creates sympathy between us.” Yet the ubiquity and power of our current communication technologies have not been used to those ends. Instead of a kind of “attentional serfdom,” Williams says that “we have to demand that these forces to which our attention is now subject start standing out of our light.” For Williams, this means “rejecting the idea that we’re powerless, that our angry impulses must control us, that our suffering must define us, or that we ought to wallow in guilt for having let things get this bad.” In just over a hundred pages, Williams provides some direct counsel for those of us who want to do just that.
We’re excited to read and celebrate the work of our alumni, particularly when they publish books describing not just their ventures but the stories that give shape to their work in the world. For that reason, we were excited to receive a copy of Beyond Blood: Hope and Humanity in the Forgotten Fight Against Aids. Written by Duncan Kimani Kamau, Justin Miller, and Cornel Onyango Nyaywera, Beyond Blood tells the story of how three men from divergent backgrounds came to found Care for Aids, a non-profit providing support for folks living with HIV/AIDS in East Africa. But, truthfully, the book is much more than that. It is a story of how God has braided three lives together to create a kind of “redemptive friendship” across real difference.
Finally, we are committed to highlighting the work of other community members in the work of Redemptive Entrepreneurship. To that end, we were very glad to see Jake Thomsen’s stimulating and practical essay on “The Commander’s Intent” published on the Faith Driven Entrepreneur blog. Offering up a “big picture” account of how our daily work can take shape in light of God’s purposes not just for ourselves but for our world, Jake — a Partner at Sovereign’s Capital weaves together a number of themes of both relevance and importance for redemptive entrepreneurs, making a clear and compelling case for how we can marshall our real but limited powers to “set the world right” across multiple dimensions.
Let us know what you think of these reads!
