Capitalism: You're doing it wrong.

(mild spoiler ahead for Avengers: Endgame. If you haven't seen the movie and are sensitive about that kind of thing skip the first paragraph below).

A M?bius strip looks like a belt that has had its ends twisted around and stapled together. So if you were to move along one side of it you would end up on the back side after one loop. The non-intuitive way to get back to where you started in one piece, is to go around it twice. At some point in Avengers: Endgame Tony Stark realizes that to save the world, natch, to save the universe from the destruction brought up on it by Thanos, our heroes would have to go around a theoretical M?bius strip twice.

Red Rocks Credit Union out of Denver, Colorado (link) is more modest in its ambitions. They're not aiming to save the whole universe. Saving the Earth will do for now. And if it's true that it is money that makes the world go round, then that is where they'll focus, and they’re doing it in a way that is—at first glance at least—as non-intuitive as Iron Man’s solution.

Earlier this week I had an interesting conversation with Judah Musick (link), Chief Innovation Officer for Red Rocks, and it seems to me that they’re on to something.

There are a number of things that are surprising about this. Red Rocks is a financial institution, not some group of wide-eyed tree-huggers. As a financial institution—albeit a not-for-profit-one—they are in the business of money, so focusing their efforts on doing good would seem out of character. The second thing that is surprising is that they are not alone in this effort. Large-bore capitalist companies like Mars and InBev also subscribe to the thoroughly innovative notion that the only way forward for capitalism is to do well by doing good.

It goes like this. (more)