My Grand Vision
It all began to crystallize when I read a single sentence
What I want to change about the world
A Major Challenge Identified and Solved
The Grand Vision begins with a new form of business entity
The Grand Vision expands as that new form begins to replicate
Choosing Reason over Greed
Keeping It Small
My role in bringing this vision to life
More about how this all will grow
It all began to crystallize when I read a single sentence
Sometime in my early twenties I read Walden II by BF Skinner. Only a few things in the book resonated for me at all, with one striking exception. Near the beginning of the book a character said (approximately) "I want to DO SOMETHING! I want to help people learn how to live together without fighting all of the time and how to get what they need without taking it from anyone else!" This so completely captured a desire I had that it has stuck with me for over twenty years.
I haven't seen the book in almost that long, and it's likely the words have changed in my mind significantly. Still, those words, as I remember them, have echoed through the rest of my life and helped me to understand and express the core of my purpose. I began to learn whatever I could about other people who have tried to make the world a better place in some grand way and studied the results of their efforts. I read about all sorts of social and political activism and looked for the bigger picture.
I thought a lot about all the different things I wanted to help change in the world. I wanted to live in a world of peace where everyone had abundant healthy food, clean air, clean water, and access to high quality education and healthcare. I wanted to live in a world where people learned from birth to cooperate and to embrace difference and diversity. I wanted many things, and most of them were already being pursued by many others. As I continued to watch and learn, I began to see a common thread.
All of these goals were well within reach of humanity. The needed resources were available. The needed technology existed. Yet efforts to make any of these changes all seemed blocked in similar ways. I traced the origins of the obstacles and found that they all ultimately lead to the same situation. Mindless institutions controlled most of the resources of our world - land, shelter, food, medicine, tools and raw materials - and they had no conscience, responsibility or accountability for what they did with those resources.
What I want to change about the world
These mega-corporations are driven by driven by a single mandate - to make as much money as possible for their stockholders. Almost all evidence of human values or sanity has been lost somewhere in the bureaucracy of these corporations. They pursue profit like some giant robot run amok and wreaking havoc in the name of a single directive, now being applied completely out of context and in ways that the people who first formed that directive would never have chosen.
Worse yet, these institutions hold by far the largest single block of influence over most of the world governments, and current systems for generating shareholder profit are heavily dependent on a large population of people sufficiently disenfranchised to be easily exploitable for corporate gain. People all over the world are working hard to address issues of education, healthcare, intolerance, ecology, and poverty, yet sooner or later all of their efforts end up at odds with the goal of corporate shareholder profit.
I began to see this as the key issue of our time. It seemed to me that if the resources of the world were transferred into the hands of human beings, either as individuals or in groups small enough to act with sanity and responsibility, then this would change the very context in which all other issues were being addressed. When humans own most of the resources, then they, not corporations, will be the dominant influence on our governments. When humans own most of the food, shelter and medicine, they will be free to share it, without regard for corporate policy or sales impact analysis.
A Major Challenge Identified and Solved
I could see the corporate dinosaur already starting to age and decay, and I knew that it was not up to me alone. Although I had not met them, I knew that many others were thinking along similar lines, and that together we could dismantle the current system safely and peacefully, and enter a new and glorious world. It took many years, and several more rebirth experiences, before I began to see the details of how this will happen and understand my own contribution to the process.
One question I asked myself along the way was 'Who or what, if not large corporations, will keep the trains running on time?' Many people on this planet have become quite attached to being able to ship packages around the world, fly anywhere they can afford on jet airplanes, flip a switch and turn on the lights, and pull out a cellular phone and talk to friends and family from almost anywhere. Very few people are ready to give up these modern conveniences. The challenge grows from the shear scale of running an international shipping company, airline, electric company, or cellular phone provider. Right now, no form of business other than large corporations is capable of managing ventures this large.
Power generation can be decentralized, as the alternative power community is proving more and more each day, but a cellular company needs towers every where you want your phone to work, and they all need to be connected to the same network. International airlines and shipping companies have similar needs that are so huge, it's hard for many to imagine a world where we continue to have access to these kinds of services without similarly huge institutions to finance and control them. Imagining such a world and reporting to others on the details was my first major task.
My answer to the question above is that micro-businesses linked together in an organic network that is flexible enough to leave them their autonomy, can finance, plan and steer any venture, no matter how large. If that last sentence makes complete and perfect sense to you, please contact me immediately. We need to be combining our efforts. If you aren't sure what such a world will look like or how it will work, keep reading, I'll fill in more details as we go.
The Grand Vision begins with a new form of business entity
Already, small business and micro-business are eating away at the corporate giants like rust eating away at damp iron. With each cycle of corporate downsizing and mergers that release redundant employees, a percentage of those people find jobs and lives outside of the corporate world and never go back. My goal is to be one of many cultivators of small and micro-business, facilitating, studying, and influencing this trend. In particular, I want to cultivate the organic networking of small and micro business, and help weave the web of cooperation that will support a world of sanity and responsibility as well as modern technology and convenience.
Another question I asked long ago was 'What's to stop the most successful small businesses of today from becoming the new megalithic corporations of tomorrow?' My answer is that we need new attitudes about business, and new kinds of business entities, both of which ignore the current bigger-is-better growth imperative of today's business world and are aimed positively and emphatically in a different direction. This new business entity includes as part of it's original intent, it's written charter and it' social contract and mandate, a goal of staying small enough for its owners/workers/participants to maintain human sanity in their business choices and human responsibility for their actions.
Such businesses have a significant advantage over larger businesses in today's rapidly changing world, because they can investigate, comprehend, and make the most of changes in technology, society and economics with speed that it impossible for any bureaucracy. Maintaining this advantage provides the business incentive to stay small. The desire to live on a planet where the resources are managed with sanity and distributed with compassion and generosity provides the personal incentive. When the pressures of market demand and magnificent success begin to pressure one of these businesses to grow, it responds organically, in much the same way that the cells in our bodies respond to growth. It creates more cells - more small businesses, each with its own autonomy to learn and act quickly, as well as it's own collective intelligence, compassion and conscience.
The Grand Vision expands as that new form begins to replicate
This cellular reproduction of businesses may take place in several ways. The simplest and the one that most sticks with well-proven business principals is for the business to invest in starting other small businesses. These businesses could be nearly identical to their parent business, but serve a different area, in the same way that a franchised chain may have locations with different owners. Other businesses with a clear division of labor may split themselves along functional lines. For instance a business may have grown to have separate groups of people focused on accounting and the primary service or product of the business. In this case the account department might split off and become a small accounting firm, which starts in the black financially because it is already right-sized for it's only client.
When investing rather than splitting is the choice, preference can be given to business ideas that are synergistic or adjacent to the parent business. If an independent natural food seller has recurring challenges in finding certain types of organic produce, it might found and finance a small organic farm that grows exactly the produce needed. Again, this farm is starting with a single customer that is sufficient to support its size. The farm may choose to use it's profits to expand and find other customers, or it may not, depending on many factors. The same is true of the accounting firm in the example above. Once networks of this new kind of businesses are growing and multiplying into a variety of markets and economic contexts, entirely unexpected ways will emerge to handle growth while staying small and autonomous.
Choosing Reason over Greed
The manner in which these cellular businesses will finance new businesses also departs from traditional venture capitalism. The funding parent business will offer financing of individual shares to the worker-owners of the new business. This financing will be similar in scale and timeframe to current home loans. Payments and interest on these loans will provide the investors with residual income for many years to come. This financing will include some percentage ownership of the business, which will transfer to the worker-owners immediately.
The remaining percentage ownership will stay with the parent business until the new business is profitable enough to purchase that percentage at its by-then current cash value. This purchase will happen a few percent at a time. Until all shares have been purchased, the parent business will have a representative voice in the operations of the new business, and will receive a percentage of the net profits equal to it's remaining percentage ownership. Any growth or expansion will increase the value of the business as a whole and thus increase the buyout value of shares, potentially to many times the original investment. The buyouts and percentage of profits will be how the investors receive most of their return. While that return may span decades and be equal to 10 or even 100 times their original investment, the new businesses will not be saddled with paying a percentage of profits to the original investors indefinitely.
These buyouts may be scheduled throughout a period similar to that spanned by the loans for initial shares, or they may be based on financial milestones in the growth of the new business. Either way, the intent will be that within 5 to 30 years, the worker-owners will collectively own one hundred percent of their own business. By then the parent company will have long ago reinvested the original capital, and much of the profits, in other new businesses, providing investors with ongoing investment income.
Individuals within this network who want completely passive, ongoing income, will have a variety of options, including investments in commercial real estate which could be managed by a property management company, development or purchase of intellectual property for which others will pay ongoing fees to use, or more traditional investment portfolios. The same array of options will also provide participants with retirement income strategies. The removal of eternal stockholder profit from the equation, returning that money to the people who earned it, will even give them the options of simply saving enough to retire and just live off their savings and/or it's interest for the rest of their lives.
Keeping It Small
There is one more question that came up for me as this vision was coming in to focus. How will a business know when it time to split or reproduce instead of just continuing to grow? The soft, safe answer to this is that these businesses will be structured to value and rely on the reaction speed that comes from being small and the worker-owners will be close enough to their own business process that it will be apparent to them if their business grows to a point where it begins to be encumbered by size. For at least some of these new businesses, the more conventional among them, this will be the answer. There is a second, audaciously radical answer to this question. Some of these businesses will operate and make decisions in a way almost unheard of in business today...by consensus.
Think for a moment about the meaning of consensus. Everyone agrees. Everyone. Even very small partnerships will need to delegate a lot of internal authority to the individual partners and reduce the number of group decisions that need to be made on the fly in order for this to work. This will ultimately reduce the actions of a business to only those things that everyone can agree on. That may occasionally mean missed profits, but this new kind of business is as much about acting with ethics and responsibility as it is about earning abundant profits...that, and putting our planet back in sane and responsible hands.
My role in bringing this vision to life
My role in this vision is to start a business that is part research project, part think tank, and part private investment partnership. This business will collect and generate business ideas (I personally have several per week on average), sort them and research their business viability, and select the ones that are the best fit for developing the new business forms I've been describing. Selected ideas will become projects that are developed to the point of turnkey micro-businesses, designed on paper and fully funded, needing only worker-owners to bring them to life. These worker-owners will be selected from a large pool of applicants that will be the result of both marketing and the quality of opportunity that they are being offered.
Once the best applicants have been selected, they will be brought together to interact and check individual compatibility to ensure that everyone gets along well and enjoys working together. This group of applicants will include more than are needed for the business, and the final group will be selected based on to be the most compatible subset with all the needed skills to make the business succeed. These finalists will be provided with any training available which will enhance their chances of success. This will include NLP-based training to improve skills in communication, strategic thinking, and personal management of mental and emotional states.
Of course most of the best applicants will already have most of these skills to a significant degree. The purpose of this round of training is to fill in any gaps and raise any skills that are less than extraordinary to a superlative level. The human factor will be critical in this new business form, so we want to make sure that each business begins with the best people possible and then help them be the best they can be. These people will be sold shares of the business as described previously, with financing provided as needed. At this point the business will be launched and follow the development and financing cycle already described.
More about how this all will grow
This business that I found will be comprised of partners with the kind of collective expertise needed for an effective think tank to study, model, and cultivate this new business form. Our contracts with the businesses we found will include access for them to that expertise on a consulting basis, as well as access for us to the detailed data regarding the growth of each business. This data will include not only financial data and sales counts, but also narratives of the challenges, successes, and decisions that shape the business along the way. The narrative data will come from minutes or recordings of meetings as well as periodic interviews with the worker-owners.
All this data will inform the think tank aspect of the business, and accelerate the development of this business form. The growing knowledge base will be made available to the various businesses we've started to maximize their chance of success when investing their profits in the creation of other new businesses. The autonomy of every business of this type will result in unfettered adaptation of these original ideas to succeed in a wider variety of contexts than the original founders could have ever identified. This new business form will evolve and adapt in much the same organic way that life evolves and adapts to whatever it encounters. This evolution will also be tracked for as many generations as practical, further accelerating development of the form.
As cash flow grows, we will create adjacent businesses that we can use as outsourcers to handle various aspects of the development of new businesses. Once this network is of sufficient size to take on such projects, we will begin to design integrated networks of autonomous micro-businesses that fill market niches too large to be addressed by a single business this small. As our ability to succeed at designing and launching this kind of network increases, we will be able to design larger and larger networks, ultimately being able to create networks large enough to fill the kind of role currently the exclusive domain of large corporations...to keep the trains running on time.