The Four Books on the Journey to HeroBridge

Written By Frank Connelly

A short read about the divine providence that put four books in our path to Community Affective Technology

-by Frank Connelly

As we ready ourselves to train our own edge Mentor Hero AI engine, and I prepare to launch my podcast Work Your Values (subscribe below), I had a chance to reflect on the providential journey that spanned the globe and resulted in seeing the world in a new way, and a deepening understanding that a tech-enabled equitable future of work is in our grasp. It’s a future without margins, and therein lies our superpower - the hero potential in all of us, when we are in community with one another.

Every time I reflect back on the journey I’m provided with a new layer of understanding of how much God was beside Deborah and I. It was not an easy journey and many experiences we had tested us incredibly, and only on reflection did we understand the constellation that God had woven for our lives and profession.

For Deborah, her book would undoubtedly be the Bible and Christ’s social teachings. For me, there were four books that arrived exactly when I needed them, and created a profound underpinning to my lived experience at the time (ie. India 2006-2012) and into the present as the co-founder of HeroBridge Media Technology.

Here are the four books in the order I “found” them, and how each served as a powerful building block of understanding about the future of work, the power of mentorship and the need for community in an incredibly connected and disconnected, marginalized world:

“Well informed stakeholders make well informed decisions.” Through a chance meeting on a UNEP project in Kodaikanal India, Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen shaped my thinking on equitable development and conscious capitalism. His book The Idea of Justice changed the way I designed Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Environment, Society and Governance (ESG) programs and stakeholder communication. The idea of building stakeholder communities within organizations became my first principles design.

“We are not whole until we are all whole.” It remains a mystery to me how I became aware of this manifesto by Jesuit priest Greg Boyle, Founder of Homeboy Industries. I had to special order it when it was released in 2010. I read it rumbling across Tamil Nadu and arrived at my destination (on the margins of the margins) I was completely transformed. I can directly attribute Fr Greg’s thoughts about the margins, the power of kinship & peer communities as the mindset that led to our first technology iteration that brought powerful mentorship to the margins. The outcome transformed them, and me. Now on his fourth book, Fr Boyle continues to form my heart and mind on the power of dignity as a transformative tool that can erase margins.

“That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be respected and loved is an extension of ethics.” My realization that my mentor, NS Adkoli in Bangalore was the Aldo Leopold of India is something I will cherish as long as I live. With Fr. Boyle’s encouragement to “draw a bigger circle around the word ‘family’, I learned to include the environment in our thinking. A beautiful regenerative cycle that only God could create. The Land Ethic was Aldo’s last and unfinished work is worth a read and should be required reading in B-School, Law School and CEO’s. Work Your Values owes a debt of gratitude to these maverick thinkers - Aldo and NS - for the clarity of a more prosperous way to prosper where all stakeholders win, even the land.

“Poverty is partly a result of (natural) assets not being valued…and fairly traded. We (instead) follow… a double bottom line approach - we will work for a social mission - that will be equally important as our profits.” Returning from the margins to New Delhi, I became in demand for building community tech-enabled workforce communities. My dear friend Ravi at UN Habitat introduced me to American-Indian business man William Bissell whose father was a buyer for Macy’s who discovered a new compassionate and dignified way of doing business in a textile industry that had followed a colonial model for centuries. This remarkable book, supported by the evidence of the world’s largest cooperative. A interdependent craft-community-to-market model that moved the margins can be eliminated completely in favor a socio-emotional and economic platform that there was “No daylight to separate us. Only kinship. Inching ourselves closer to creating a community of kinship such that God might recognize.”- Greg Boyle. Mirroring Dr Sen and Leopold’s thoughts on “the next enlightenment” of ethics, II had come full circle. HeroBridge was born from these principles, and anchored for a passion for human-centered tec

Please enjoy these books, and think about what books have made a profound impact on your lived experience. Question why those books came into your life when they did. Amazing patterns emerge that provide you a compass to better Work Your Values.

A few honorable mentions that came more recently on the journey:

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Frank Connelly
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The Hero’s Journey Continues