David Gaines

Radical Business outlines a blueprint for an innovative, inclusive, and community driven business model—proven successful by author and entrepreneur David Gaines.2024 CIPA EVVY AWARDS WINNER | GOLD “This book goes on my "sacred shelf" which holds half a dozen honored books that I use to provoke new thoughts.” —Cynthia M. Adams, founder, GrantStation.com Radical Business serves as a guide for business owners and companies eager to embrace a new, practical way of doing business. It delves into the concepts of social enterprise, showing how it can apply to anyone—be it an employee, activist, consumer, or citizen—and uses the golden rule as a catalyst for a change in mindset. A genuinely radical business returns to its root purpose: meeting a customer's need, solving a problem, and providing value. David Gaines outlines his ‘Seven Seeds Framework’ for a radical business model, which includes: • Supply Chain: Understanding the story behind every product. • Employees: Building successful brands with happy teams. • Customers: Defining ethical marketing. • Community: Fostering healthy interdependence • Competitors: Embracing the belief that a rising tide lifts all boats. • Environment: Rethinking the costs & benefits to going green. • Self: Ensuring true sustainability through self-care. Through real-life business insights, actionable steps for positive impact, and in-depth analysis of supply chain and environmental interactions, Radical Business offers strategies to help us leave the world better than we found it.

For fifty years, the music, words, story, and fans of Bob Dylan have fascinated David Gaines. As a son, a husband, a father, a teacher, and a passionate lover of the literary in all its guises, he has pursued the poetic fusion of knowledge and emotion all his life. More often than not, Dylan’s lyrics and music have expressed that fusion for him, and so he has encouraged others to acknowledge the musician or writer or painter or director or actor or athlete who matters deeply (perhaps a bit mysteriously) to them, and to deploy that enigmatic passion in service of selfknowledge and social connection. After all, one of the central reasons to be a fan is to compare notes, explore mysteries, and riff with fellow fans in a community of exploration.Gaines’s personal journey toward creating such communities of passionate knowledge encompasses his own coming of age and marriages, fatherhood, and teaching. As a devoted fan who is also a professor of American literature, questions about teaching and learning are central to his experience. When asked, “Why Dylan?” he says, “He’s the writer I care about the most. He’s been the way into the best and longest running conversations I have ever had.” Talking with students, exchanging Dylan trivia with fellow fans, or cheering on fanmusicians doing Dylan covers during the Dylan Days festival, Gaines shows that, for many people, being a fan of popular culture couples serious critical and creative engagement with heartfelt commitment. Here, largely unheralded, the ideal of liberal education is realized every day.