I’ve been on the “bleeding edge” of business thinking and education for four decades...
I grew up in Richardson, Texas with parents who did their best to give me a healthy and culturally rich homelife. After graduating from Texas A & M in 1973 with a degree in Business Management and a masters in Educational Psychology, my first assignment as 2nd Lieutenant in the US Air Force landed me on an elite manpower management team.
Our 9-member team (3 officers, 6 enlisted) was tasked with determining the skill and leadership requirements for every work center on the air force base where I was assigned. – from the commander to the cooks in the mess hall. Of the manpower teams on over 300 bases across the world, we earned USAF Outstanding Management Engineering Team Award for 1975.
That recognition propelled me to another team in Denver, Colorado to design the first computer-based training system for the US Air Force. We now call this online learning. When I left the Air Force in 1979 as a highly decorated Captain, I took this innovative technology to large corporations for the next eleven years. During the following thirty years, I founded, co-founded, or served on the board and executive teams of twenty-eight business and non-profit organizations.
My teams created the first interactive videodisc training for the banking industry, designed the first shopping mall computer touch screen kiosk, and led the adult snowboarding industry! I initiated and co-chaired the nation’s first graduate department on Leadership and Organizational Transformation, served as president of the international Association for the Development of Computer-based Instructional Systems, and as co-founder and Dean of the online Networking University, with over 100 faculty and over 200,000+ course enrollments from direct sales professionals around the world.
This journey always has me on a team. It’s my most important lesson understanding the importance of team. The people we choose to be around, to share our inspirations, and form a common commitment to an important mission, we become a team that can make a difference in the world. We can have fun together!
I met Marian in 1981 at an international conference in Montreal. I was smart enough to invite her to join our consulting team and she accepted! A few years later we married and have been life partners ever since. We both took a workshop based on the works of Buckminster Fuller. He coined the term Spaceship Earth. We learned an even greater appreciation for thinking from the perspective of the Good of the Whole. Our planet is our home, and we have a responsibility to care for it.
My passion is to inspire and guide individuals, groups, and organizations to live their dreams while contributing to the good of the Whole. I’m seeing the next evolution of capitalism, of business, moving from the sole purpose of enriching investors and shareholders to a nonprofit model where business exists to enrich our communities.
Anyone who provides the financial capital to start the business can be repaid from the income with a reasonable limit on ongoing profit. An example might be that an investor earns a small percentage, say 2% of the business profits over several years, instead of 100% of the profits in perpetuity. Nonprofit business can maximize revenues, pay good salaries, and earn money. A little for the investors and the great majority for reinvestment in the company and the community it serves.
Affordable housing is in the news because it’s a problem we are recognizing that is becoming important to us all. Think of your home or the place where your business rents space. Visualize the land it’s on being vacant, empty. Someone bought that land and the one who sold it probably made a profit that increased the cost of that land.
Then a developer came along and decided they could buy that land, build a home on it, and sell it at a profit. In this phase the developer hires several companies and pays each of them for their work including a profit for each. The survey company, the grading company, the plumbing company for the waterlines and sewer pipes, the foundation and concrete company, and so on. After all these separate profit centers build the house or commercial building, the developer adds on his 15% or 20% PROFIT and asks a real estate agent to sell it or lease it earning another 5-7% on top of it all.
I’ve been thinking through this process. If we buy this home or building, hold it several years, we expect to resale it for even more. We call that equity. We have been engaged in this money-making process for many years, continuing to increase the cost of our property. The problem now emerges that collectively, fewer and fewer of us earn enough money to be able to qualify for a loan to pay someone’s equity increase that they are asking for to sell their property. People double or triple up to share the rent or pay the mortgage. Our children and grandchildren are now caught up in this spiral to houselessness.
I founded the Ohana Legacy Foundation to study this situation and to develop whole systems alternatives. A growing team of over 30 members has discovered that if the Ohana foundation were to be able to vertically integrate the construction process, we could reduce the cost of a home or building by at least 50%.
Additionally, to address climate change, we can replace the traditional tree-based construction materials with hemp for a more cost effective, climate positive building solution. To top it off, if the foundation can own and rent the properties, we can maintain the rental cost to be only the property maintenance costs plus whatever any loan costs may be. The rental costs never rise to market rate.
We recognize that using the home as a wealth building tool is something most of us can no longer do. We have reached the tipping point where we can no longer afford the rent/mortgage payment that allows these many profit centers to make money. A new system for living must emerge and we’re working on one alternative.
Here on Kauai, we need 5,000 homes today. Our goal is to build at least 1,000 of these over the next 5 years using 3D house printing and hemp-based construction materials as much as we can. As a nonprofit, we transfer our knowledge as quickly as we can to additional communities across the US and the world. Other teams can build too.
We need your wisdom and financial support. No one else is coming. We’re looking for financial partners to strategize to solve this crisis. Join us at our website – OhanaLegacyFoundation.org
Now we have Regenrus as a social impact organization about to be certified as a B Corporation. We’re all about building excellent products and committing to supporting the greater good in as many ways as we can.
Website: https://ohanalegacyfoundation.org/