“There will come a day when you will not be able to tell the difference between a for-profit and a nonprofit organization.” Those words, spoken by the late Peter Drucker to the Harvard Business Review in 1993, planted the seeds that have led to Value, the first new business magazine in a decade.

Value offers a new lens on tomorrow’s markets, enterprise and investment. According to the editors, “A large part of value creation has to do with maximizing economic value and financial returns for shareholders. Yet, it is increasingly obvious that in order to maximize economic value one must consider not simply the easily defined indicators we have traditionally relied upon, but rather the less easily defined aspects of value that are extra-financial often social and/or environmental in nature.”

John’s discovery of Value and subsequent post prompted me to probe a bit deeper into the site. First of all, it’s nice to see a business magazine that has the phrase “Tomorrow’s Markets” in the sub-title. Nicer still is that Value provides content of...well, value. Take for instance this excellent interview, The Global Economy's Immune System, conducted by John Elkington with Paul Hawken, the noted environmentalist and businessman.

Their conversation gets right to the point, and Hawken expresses some serious criticism of the bottom of the pyramid hypothesis. Excerpts:

I’m also more than a little concerned about the thinking that there are three billion new consumers out there, that the next big thing is the “bottom of the pyramid.” From the view of the global south that is not trained in corporations and business schools, it smacks of colonialism and imperialism all over again... It is about this idea that we can open up the bottom of the pyramid to a flood of Western-made goods that will vault them into the lower to middle classes. But then what? What the poor want are rights, not foil packets. I hope that you take these issues head on.