David Armistead - Principal

David Armistead is a consultant to businesses and communities seeking to thrive in the emerging new global economy, and a consultant and coach to community building leaders and entrepreneurs committed to creating paths of livelihood that produce wellbeing. He is best known for his work in the following areas:

• Designing to thrive in the New Economic Pattern: re-imagining wealth, capital, coordination and organization in New Economic Pattern terms
• Developing leaders for New Economic Pattern operations: leading toward thriving and maximizing full spectrum capital returns
• Thriving organization development: utilizing continuous coordination and developing self-organizing work teams and workflows
• Thriving community development: using local self-reliance based growth strategies to fuel area wealth creation, cultivating local business ecosystems that provision the community to produce self-reliance.

A writer and presenter who frequently addresses business and community leaders on New Economic Pattern issues, he is also known for coining New Economic Pattern related terms and concepts including community making entrepreneur and full spectrum capital.

In addition to his role as Principal of Thriving Business Solutions, David is a Principal at Thriving Community Solutions, and serves on the board of directors at the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems. His work on New Economic Pattern and thriving organizations and communities began in 2000 and continues. He previously worked as a business consultant at Coopers & Lybrand and then Laventhol & Horwath, performed contract international financial investigations for various government agencies and major banks, was a founder and startup VP of Business Development for Alchemy Systems, and served as President and Executive Director of Hands of the Community (non-profit).

Ruth Glendinning - Associate

Ruth Glendinning was born in London UK, grew up in Texas, lived in the Caribbean, California and Oklahoma where she worked with Native American tribes, before firmly planting her roots in Austin, Texas. She is a social entrepreneur and innovator working with clients in the local, national and global arenas focusing on grassroots entrepreneurship with a special emphasis on women’s work, including food and craft accelerators. 

Her entrepreneurial path began in Los Angeles and continued in Austin, Texas where she discovered her true passion lay in the social entrepreneurship sector of the market. It was here that Ruth developed the model of cultural strategy which demonstrates the importance of creating a balance between community, culture and commerce for sustainable economy which was most notably demonstrated with the creation of the Community Renaissance Market (CRM), a 60,000 square foot grocery store repurposed into a microbusiness incubator containing 40+ microbusinesses. To better reflect the purpose of CRM to incubate businesses which meet the criteria of sustainable, local, organic work, she trademarked the “SLOW Tech® Incubator” (Sustainable Local Organic Work + Technology) concept in which specific technology is added to no-or low-tech community-based human-scale businesses to better equip them to thrive. Ultimately SLOW Tech is about using technology to improve the human experience, rather than distract from it. 

In addition to her role as Associate with Thriving Business Solutions, Ruth is Partner of Thriving Community Solutions, where she is the relationship builder/connector/creative partner on projects that are mapped to real needs in the market, catalyzed by expanding technology and activated by personal relationships.