Exchanging with others is an inescapable dimension of human life. The roots of commerce are an ancient legacy: coordinating action — exchanging energy, information, and material — to ensure that our people thrive.

Remember the innovation scene from Apollo 13? Did your heart rate change? How else did you respond? The engineers in Houston had 30 minutes to figure out a solution before the Astronauts started dying.

Early humans on the plains of Africa had a lot less than 30 minutes. When a predator approached, how did they figure out who would do what if the big cat went left, or alternatively, if it went right? The ingenuity and mutual commitment that allowed those small hominids to succeed in those critical moments transformed our ancestors. They invented language. They created stories to inspire courage and exploration. They designed roles and networks of commitments and cultures that embedded knowledge and loyalty. They discovered new tools, processes, and materials.

The ingenuity and mutual commitment that allows humans to thrive together still feels great to us. And it still wins. Top-performing teams regularly tap into that way of being.

Those cooperative practices are 3+ million years old. Their legacy impacts us all — somatically, cognitively, and emotionally — much to the despair of most managers, who are struggling to understand why employee, customer, and shareholder enthusiasm has become so elusive. And why what they 'know' no longer seems relevant.

Distilled to the essentials, commerce is nothing more — and nothing less — than an exchange of promises. For most of human history, those promises meant the difference between life and death, ("You get the kids up the tree; I'll throw stones at the lion". "I'll be back by sunset with fish; you bring firewood.")

Somehow, sometime — mostly since the Industrial Revolution — the simple power and enormous importance of promises became opaque to most leaders. In the modern world exchanges seem complicated; value seems hard to generate; integrity seems rare.

Commerce is not just business; it's the way people function together. It's the source of power in the modern world. It's as important in the not-for-profit and governmental sectors, and in our personal and 'volunteer' relationships, as it is in business enterprises.