value based management, ethic of care, Indigenous business, Maori business, sustainability, relational wellbeing and wealth, stakeholder theory,

Organizations are searching for innovative business approaches that deliver profits and create shared value for all stakeholders. We show what can be learned from the relational wisdom approach of Indigenous Māori and reframe the prevailing economic argument that has seen companies profit and prosper at the expense of communities and ecologies. We develop an ethic of kaitiakitanga model premised on Māori values which holds the potential to enrich and further humanize our understanding of business. The Māori economy is a globally connected, prosperous, and profitable sector of the New Zealand economy. By drawing on Māori values, we present a wisdom position through an ethic of kaitiakitanga or stewardship to emphasize and illustrate the interconnectedness of life in a woven universe. Through practicing kaitiakitanga, organizations can build businesses where wisdom is consciously created through reciprocal relationships. In this worldview of business, humans are stewards endowed with a mandate to use the agency of their mana (spiritual power, authority, and sovereignty) to create mauri ora (conscious well-being) for humans and ecosystems-and this commitment extends to organizations.

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Polynesians possess oral traditions that reveal sophisticated understandings of the world and of their place in it. These typically take the form of an elaborate cosmogony beginning with the origin of the universe and the primal parents, then continuing to trace the descent of living and nonliving, material and immaterial phenomena, including humans.Among New Zealand Mäori, such knowledge is encoded and recorded in a mental construct called whakapapa (having an underlying meaning, "to place in layers" [Williams 1975, 259]). In a commonly applied form, that of recording human descent lines and relationships, whakapapa functions as a genealogical table or family pedigree in which the lineages connect each papa or layer (a metaphorical reference to each generation of a family).The extent to which this underlying theoretical rationale for human whakapapa applies to the nonhuman has hitherto remained unexplored, at least in the published literature. To understand the meaning of plant and animal whakapapa requires knowledge of not only plant and animal names but also their accompanying narratives. Typically, these take an allegorical form in which explanatory theories as well as moral principles are explicated. In its totality, Mäori use of whakapapa and narrative creates a "metaphysical gestalt" or whole, integrated pattern, for the oral communication of knowledge (Hohepa, pers comm, 1996).Renewed interest in whakapapa in New Zealand arises directly from recent worldwide controversy over the genetic modification (gm) of plants and animals, and, in particular, of transgenic modifications involving the 1

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