Sebastian Klein, author and activist for tax justice, studied psychology. His subsequent entry into strategy consulting was the opposite of what he had learned: there, only money and profit were the focus.
You can simply tell that this old model, where people are resources to be consumed, no longer works and does not fit our time.
Therefore, he founded Neue Narrative. The print magazine serves as both a workbook and a source of knowledge. It also includes 9 Spaces, a digital platform for the development and transformation of organizations. This is intended to help companies learn not to consume people as resources and not to harm the planet, but to do the opposite.
Klein often refers to the so-called donut model by economist Kate Raworth: If a company makes too little profit, it goes bankrupt. If it makes too much profit, it causes harm, for example, when employees are overwhelmed and unable to work or when the environment is damaged.
This is where New Work comes into play, meaning new forms of work. For Sebastian Klein, this means people-oriented work: the individual is at the center, and their needs and personality are taken seriously. However, this does not mean that everything else is pushed to the background.
On one hand, we are an incredibly wealthy society. We have 25 trillion euros in private wealth. And yet we constantly lack money everywhere. We can't afford anything. We have to save. We can't implement climate protection. We can't bring our schools up to a modern standard.
From this, Klein derives the central question of transformation: How must organizations function so that good people can do good instead of causing great harm?
Without this change, companies will not be able to keep up with the times: they will not remain profitable and will have to close. At the same time, new companies are being founded, and this is part of the economy, as Sebastian Klein explains. Because operating responsibly and staying within planetary boundaries is the only alternative.
