The Nature of Work: How Ecosystems Can Teach Us to Build Lasting and Fulfilling Businesses

The collection of lectures and publications from the Schumacher Center for a New Economics represents some of the foremost voices on a new economics.

The entrepreneurial spirit of the Internet in the late 1990s drew Matt Stinchcomb into the Internet-business arena, the "maker movement,” and ultimately, the launch of Etsy in 2005. As co-creator of Etsy, he established a highly successful intersection of the market for handmade products and artists looking to sell on a wide-reaching platform. Deeply influenced by E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful and Bill McKibben’s Deep Ecology, which emphasized the importance of human-scale and local community economies, Stinchcomb sees the rise of small businesses as paving the way for a new economy. He explores the sustainable-business lessons that can be learned by observing ecosystem dynamics, challenging the audience to view everything in our lives—including our businesses and our choices--as connected rather than fragmented.