Let’s return to one of RoundMap’s foundations: the Business Model Matrix.
Within it, I originally identified four foundational business models: Customer Centricity, Product Centricity, Resource Centricity, and Platform Centricity. At the time, these felt fundamental—not just to how companies operate, but to how they make profit. They appeared to describe the essential logics of business itself.
Over time, however, as my work moved steadily toward regenerativity, I began questioning something deeper than business models. I began questioning the very foundation of capitalism—capital.
If capital sits at the root of modern business, then it is hardly surprising that most value attractors are designed to generate more of it. Growth pulls toward accumulation. Incentives bend toward extraction. Success becomes synonymous with capital expansion.
This, I believe, is where capitalism took a wrong turn.
Early thinkers—Adam Smith foremost among them—did not envision an amoral system driven purely by accumulation. Smith explicitly assumed the presence of a strong moral fabric, social norms, and civic responsibility. Markets were to be free, yes—but embedded within ethical restraint and social accountability. Competition was meant to serve prosperity, not dominate it.
That assumption, known as the invisible hand, proved dangerously optimistic.
The combined force of human greed and the desire for power, later legitimized by Friedman’s doctrine that profit maximization is the primary responsibility of business, inverted the system. Profit ceased to be an outcome and became the foundation. A thriving economy was replaced by a thriving balance sheet. The “invisible hand” no longer guided morality—it excused its absence.
So the question becomes unavoidable:
If capital should not be at the center of business—what should be?
My answer is: value.
Not capitalized value. Not monetized value. But value as such.
Value cannot be sold, owned, hoarded, or stockpiled. It can only be perceived—by stakeholders, communities, ecosystems, and future generations. It emerges through use, contribution, trust, meaning, and continuity. Capital is a representation of value; it is not value itself.
This introduces a new orientation: Value Centricity.
Value Centricity is not a business model in the traditional sense. It is a model of business—one that is relatively immune to manipulation, extraction, and enclosure. Value resists short-term optimization. It refuses to be reduced to quarterly KPIs. It reveals itself only over time—through second-, third-, fourth-, and even fifth-generation effects.
And yet, it is precisely this long-term emergence of value that drives true prosperity, sustainability, and equitability.
Capital-centric systems ask: How do we extract more?
Value-centric systems ask: How do we contribute more—and allow value to circulate, compound, and regenerate?
Seen this way, regenerativity is not an ethical add-on to capitalism. It is a correction of its foundational error. Not by rejecting markets, but by re-centering them on what was always meant to matter—value as lived, shared, and sustained.
Capital follows value.
When value leads, capital behaves.
