Capitalism isn't the problem. The story we tell about it is.

The false story at the heart of free-market capitalism shaped decades of work. It's time to design something better.

We're still struggling to move past a story about work that we fashioned 250 years ago. Our thinking hasn't moved much past the Industrial Revolution when we decided to believe that workers only worked for money. We believed that assumption so firmly we designed work in a way that made it true — and the resulting story remains the way we understand work.

Businesses need a new model to thrive, and that starts by making different assumptions that shape a different story.

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We've been telling the wrong story

In 1776, Adam Smith, economic theorist and founder of free-market capitalism, put forth his view of humanity as it relates to work: "It is in the inherent interest of every man to live as much at his ease as he can; and if his emoluments are to be precisely the same whether he does or does not perform some very laborious duty, to perform it in as careless and slovenly a manner that authority will permit."

His view perpetuated three fundamental assumptions. First, people only work for the …