Last week I outlined a scenario
for a post-capitalist,
post-consumer economy
, and suggested that the engine for this economy would be New Collaborative
Enterprises (NCEs), which writer-philosopher Daniel Quinn first envisaged
and called New Tribal Ventures. The purpose of this post is to lay
out a blueprint for creating such enterprises. It's very rough. This
is very much a work in process, a first inarticulate attempt to spec out something
potentially very important. Please write me and tell me how to make it better.
Are You Ready?
First, a checklist of readiness. If you answer 'no' to most
or all of these questions, you are probably ready to walk away from
the consumer-capitalist economy and help establish a new economy that puts
well-being ahead of wealth. Or perhaps you already have.
- Does your standard of accomplishment and your measure
of self-worth depend substantially on your material wealth and/or your level
of income?
- Do you (when you travel or go on vacation), and would you (when
you retire), find it difficult to give up the personal physical possessions
that root you in one place, in return for the freedom that comes from being
comfortable anywhere?
- Do you (or would you) get an important sense of security from
having a large 'nest-egg' and knowing that you have enough assets to last
a long time if your income suddenly stopped?
- Does the idea of running your own business terrify you?
- Are you genuinely happy doing what you do every day to make
a living?
If you are retired, you should put these questions in the past tense
and answer them in respect of the final few years of your 'working' life.
If your answers would have been 'no' then, you're probably ready to help
others establish NCEs. The under-utilized talents of retired citizens will
play a critical role in building this new economy.
Even if you answer 'yes' to most of the first four questions and 'no'
to the fifth, you may be ready to at least start thinking about establishing
an NCE, and knowing more about them might ultimately change your answers
to the earlier questions.
What is a New Collaborative Enterprise?
In simple terms, an NCE is a self-selected, self-managed group of people
(members) making a living together following a set of agreed-upon principles.
It differs from traditional commercial enterprises in several important
ways:
- Where traditional commercial enterprises are hierarchical
and their relationship to their 'employees' is limited and contractual,
NCEs are completely flat, equal networks of peers who accept full responsibility
for the well-being of all of their members.
- Where traditional commercial enterprises have HR departments
that hire and fire employees based on competencies and performance, members
of NCEs must agree unanimously to accept or expel members based on whether
they provide skills critical to the enterprise.
- Where traditional commercial enterprises strive to grow
and maximize profit for shareholders, NCEs have no shares and operate at
the size that optimizes members' well-being (as the members define well-being).
Practically speaking, an NCE is limited in size by the necessity to
involve all members in most decision-making, and by the need for that decision-making
to be consensual, agreed to by all members without the need for voting.
How is an NCE different from other types of collaborative enterprise?
- Unlike a family business, all members of an NCE have
an equal say in decisions, and there are no 'mere' employees or absentee
'shareholders'. You're either a member or you're not.
- Unlike a commune, members of an NCE don`t necessarily
live together, or even in the same country.
- Unlike a cooperative, an NCE is not ancillary to the
main 'business' of the members, and does more than just purchase goods for
resale to its members at cost.
- Unlike a collective, the work-product of the NCE is
developed and owned by the members working together, rather than by the
individual members under a loose cost-sharing 'umbrella'.
The 'agreed-upon' principles by which NCEs operate are more like a code
of conduct than a corporate charter. Although every NCE will have its own
principles, the following common principles will probably be necessary
both to differentiate the NCE from a commercial business enterprise (and
hence attract disenchanted people away from those enterprises), and for
the survival of NCEs collectively:
- Every member has an equal say in all aspects of the operations
of the NCE, and all decisions, including decisions on acceptance of new
members and expulsion of members, are made by consensus. [This is radically
different from how most businesses are now run. Women are generally better
at building consensus than men, and at achieving compromise. The consequence
of failure to achieve consensus -- that one or more members will leave the
NCE -- will necessarily encourage NCEs to become very good at building consensus,
or to stay small if they can't.]
- When the NCE becomes unwieldy it will, by mutual consent,
split into two or more logical, networked NCEs.
- The NCE will as much as possible attempt to do business
with other NCEs in preference to profit-motivated enterprises.
- The NCE will define success as the achievement of
well-being for its members, which may include any of: financial security,
health, happiness, fun, feeling of belonging, feeling of making a difference,
feeling of giving back to society and the world, love for others, time for
other pursuits, intellectual challenge, emotional fulfilment etc.
- The NCE will maintain high social standards, including
respect for others' rights, freedoms and opinions, contribution to the
welfare of the society beyond just the NCE's members, etc.
- The NCE will maintain high environmental standards, including
minimization of waste, pollution, and use of non-renewable resources, keeping
a small ecological footprint etc.
- The NCE recognizes that there is more to life than work,
and will strive to allow members as much time to pursue other activities
as possible without critically compromising the NCE's ability to achieve
well-being for its members.
I am sure that many readers will see the above principles as naive and
unworkable, perhaps even contrary to human nature. Families in fact operate
on similar principles, and our record at keeping them together and functioning
well without coercion is unimpressive. However, I believe that once several
NCEs show the way, and prove that this model of making a living works well,
with much happier members than the employees of traditional commercial enterprises,
the tipping
point
at which this model begins to supplant the old economic model could be
reached quite quickly.
This model is instinctively more human, more satisfying, and more
sustainable than the commercial model that underpins our current economy.
If a large number of people, as a matter of principle, only bought goods
made domestically, this would radically refocus the economy on local job-generating
production. Likewise, if a large number of people only bought goods and
services from NCEs, the exploitative, acquisitive, destructive consumer-capitalist
economy would quickly go the way of past 'obsolesced' economies. The old
economy would be simply and painlessly replaced.
How to Create a New Collaborative
Enterprise
This is actually the easy part. First you need to decide how you
want to make a living (i.e. what you want your role to be, what you want
to do, not what industry you want to be part of). Then
you need to find others that have complementary skills to yours, people
you would like to make a living with. Remember, this isn't
a commune, you don't have to want to live with these people, or even
share their politics or worldview, you just need to mutually agree (a) that
your and their skills are necessary, complementary and collectively sufficient
for a viable enterprise (b) that you can accept each other's definition
of well-being (everyone's is different) and agree to work collaboratively
to achieve all members' well-being, and (c) that you can agree on a set
of operating principles like the one above. The Internet is a great place
to start looking, and
social software
promises to make it much easier to find people you'd like to make a living
with.
That's it. From here on, it's just like setting up and running any other
unincorporated enterprise. With the right talent, energy, and stewardship,
it's hard to go wrong. Here are the basic steps to get started, Entrepreneurialism
101 :
- Plan: Put together an enterprise plan. Explain what your
enterprise will do, and who (members and customers) it will do it for.
Describe how it will do it uniquely to their satisfaction. Identify what
resources (skills, time, tools, space, materials, cash) it will need to
get started, and once it gets going. Determine where those resources will
come from (contributed by members, contributed by customers, acquired
outside). Reconsider whether you have the right members.
- Research: Verify the answers to each point in your plan: Make
sure your customers really want what you plan to offer, and that you really
know who the customers are. Make sure you can get the resources you need.
Allow for contingencies and unexpected change.
- Test: Start small, try things out, fail quickly and inexpensively,
and learn.
- Set Goals, Roles & Processes: Agree with your members on
what you're trying to achieve (leading to their definition of well-being),
what everyone's role will be, how you will operate (principles + procedures),
and who will do what by when (schedule).
- Manage your Resources. Make sure you have enough but not too
much. If you don't, agree on what needs to be done.
- Promote Your Enterprise. Make sure the people that want what
you offer know you exist.
- Use Your Networks: Build networks of customers, suppliers, potential
members, and people whose opinion or expertise you trust. Give and take
from each.
- Adapt to Change. When your customers' needs change, or the economy
changes, or your resource needs change, or resource availability changes,
get your members to agree how you need to adapt.
It is not inconceivable that the line between your members and your customers
will blur or even disappear, especially if the enterprise is large and your
offering is a basic need like food. Self-sufficiency, as people who live
on islands know, is a good thing.
There will be failures. We've been conditioned to compete with those we
work with, to take out more than we put in (if we can get away with it), to
work at what we think we're good at rather than what we really want to do,
and to allow decisions to be made without consensus. These are hard things
to unlearn. Just as there are failed marriages, it will take some time and
experience to figure out exactly who we each want to make a living with, and
most of us won't get it entirely right the first time. But such failures are
critical lessons and have a very low cost -- you just change the membership
and keep going. There are no shares, no corporations to wind up, no bankruptcies,
no lawyers or accountants or bankers to have to deal with, no property
to divide up.
This is very early thinking on this subject, and much more thinking needs
to be done, and many lessons learned, before the launching of New Collaborative
Enterprises can become an art, much less a science. As with all human ventures,
we'll figure out how to do this by trial and error, and the pioneers will
pave the way. We need people to build on these ideas, to spread the word,
to talk about it and tinker with the model I've outlined above, probably
until it is unrecognizable, and until it isn't my idea, but ours.
Next installment: What readers and others have to say,
and who's actually doing it.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
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