Value based enterprise

There has been and will continue to be thousands of articles about the current economic situation. The people on the far left will call this failure of free market capitalism, and the far right will blame the Bill Clinton types for forcing banks to lend to anybody with bad credit......
In all this finger pointing a few basic facts and fundamentals are missed out.

Human enterprise is based on value creation. In the last few years this basic fact has been ignored. Business organizations and their leaders resorted to increasingly complex financial instruments that actually obscured all visibility to the fundamental measures for any successful business. Hence wealth creation was not based on any real tangible value to people or the economy in general.
In the past even though the Internet or dot-com bubble left a lot of us with broken wallets, at the very least it also left us with great infrastructure for progress in telecommunications, IT, and worldwide collaborative projects. Unfortunately this time round the financial bubble has left us with no basic tangible value.
Whether we need a bail out package, or what a bail out package should like can be debated for ever, but the only way out in the long term is to engineer truly valuable technology or products. An area of enterprise that has great potential for value creation, both in terms of social and economic value is "green technologies". The organizations that can drive value through true innovation in green technologies have a great chance of sustainable value creation. Having said this there is also the potential of the "green bubble"

The "green bubble" would constitute of organizations and governments painting everything they do with a "green "twist, knowing full well that there is no true value to society. Then again this becomes a game of fake wealth creation and hence a bubble.

Hopefully human enterprise in the long term will mean value creation in socio economic terms. Currently, through the credit crises, the china milk scandal and the hundreds of different "easy money" schemes we come across daily , we are stuck in a mode of wealth creation with no social benefits.

Being an optimist, I believe in the long term good of the human enterprise. But also being a pragmatist, I will review all green initiatives with a microscope to ensure that there is tangible socio economic value to the enterprise.

Just as I finished my draft I saw a great article in the New York times by Thomas L. Friedman titled 'Green' the bailout. He concentrates on primarily an American perspective.