We call it an evergreen story because it is a story about a new way of moving money towards peace through investment in the happiness of cash flow that is “evergreen”, in a sense borrowed from the law and legal drafting, where it is used to refer to a contract that is open-ended and self-regenerating, automatically renewing and continuing on, unless and until one of the parties affirmatively decides to go a different way, and terminates the agreement through notice duly given.

I once heard a very successful Wall Street venture capitalist say during a keynote speech at an academic gathering on the future of investing words to the effect that “one thing you learn as a venture capitalist is how much cash flow is happiness for the corporation”.  The venture capitalist spoke of “the corporation” because he was speaking from inside the currently dominant narrative of growth as the pathway to prosperity. This is a narrative of investment-decision making through securities trading, and of the overarching importance of liquidity to the the markets for maintaining a market-clearing price.  In that narrative, enterprise is the corporation.

In the new narrative we need that is right for our times, we can leave the corporation to one side, at least for now, and talk just about the enterprise as a physical coming-together of people to do work that creates wealth for themselves by delivering choices to others, choices that others value enough to be willing (and are able) to pay a price in order to enjoy the benefit of.

For this enterprise, happiness is cash flow.

I have also heard it said by a former fiduciary steward of a very large US public employees pension plan that the most important question that every pension fiduciary grapples with is this:

“How can I generate adequate cash flows, forever?”

Cash flow, it seems, is happiness for enterprise, and also for good stewardship. So, why not connect the two together, directly, through negotiated agreement on strategies for generating cash flows, on expectations for the cash flows to be generated through successful strategy execution and on priorities for sharing in cash flows if and as generated?

Could this become a bold, innovative and practical way to begin moving money towards Peace, as Invest In Peace wants us to be doing?

This will drive a paradigm shift in how we think about work and wealth