Henry Demarest Lloyd wrote in March 1881, that “When monopolies succeed, the people fail …“, in his piece denouncing the practices of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. Capitalism does not have to be corporatism. There is little doubt today about the extent of corporate power and influence of monopolies, especially in their newest form: platform capitalism. In 1967, John Kenneth Galbraith warned of the dangers of blindly having faith in our corporate systems.
“The greater danger is in the subordination of belief to the needs of the modern industrial system … These are that technology is always good; that economic growth is always good; that firms must always expand; that consumption of goods is the principal source of happiness; that idleness is wicked; and that nothing should interfere with the priority we accord to technology, growth, and increased consumption.”
In 1994, Peter Drucker discussed the rise of the knowledge worker, a term that Drucker coined in 1959 [coincidentally, the year I was born]. Drucker saw that the shift to a society of knowledge workers would not be easy, as we still struggle with it today.
“It is also the first society in which not everybody does the same work, as was the case when the huge majority were farmers or, as seemed likely only forty or fifty years ago, were going to be machine operators.
This is far more than a social change. It is a change in the human condition.”
Today, we deal with some of the same struggles against monopolies as Demarest Lloyd, but we are several billion more people, facing climate change and environmental degradation. At the same time, our democracies are under attack from the abuse of surveillance technologies by corporations and governments. The change in the human condition identified by Drucker requires new thinking and new models in practice. Part of changing the human condition is changing the way we organize to work.
I became a partner at EthosVO this year because I want to continue my work toward the democratization of the workplace, which has been my professional focus for the past decade. Many people talk about the future of work, on stages around the world, and say that organizations must become more transparent and work out loud. Yet many of these people structure their companies in the same manner as Standard Oil, with the spoils going to the few. EthosVO is different.
“Our business model is to secure long term annuity revenue associated with service innovation around our themes, focusing on execution capability rather than creation of IP [intellectual property]. We have mixed the limited-company model with the partnership model, taking what we believe is the best of both, to create a governance framework for our own work.
We think many of the principles we have adopted can be usefully generalised for the world at large, and that our environment can act as a stepping-off point from pure capitalism less painfully than a pure contracting/sole trader model.” —Robert Pye
In order to talk about the future of work, I believe I have to practice it. First I did this as a freelancer, part of a new wave of work-from-home, globally-connected knowledge workers, beginning in 2003. Later, in 2009, five of us established an international think-tank, the Internet Time Alliance, where we continue to advance better ways for people to work and learn. EthosVO is the next step on this journey. If work is learning, and learning is the work, we need to work in order to learn. Just talking about the future of work is not enough. Jon Husband has described wirearchy as, “an interconnected hyperlinked structure of negotiated (either implicit or explicit) agreements based upon accessible information and knowledge, credibility, trust, and results.” Putting this into practice is a start.
Update: I am no longer a member of Ethos VO
There’s so much here for me to chew on, partly from what you wrote and partly from my experiences of the past 50 years or so. I have long believed many of the people who work at integrating social learning and collaboration within the enterprise are far too limited in their vision, which all too often tends to stop at the sidewalk of wherever they work.
I have long been an advocate of rethinking our valuation of IP as well, especially since it appears copyright and patent laws have expanded in many instances to the point where they no longer protect, but rather prevent innovation. I love the wording Robert Pye uses, ” . . . execution capability rather than creation of IP.” It reminds me of my experience convincing engineers to participate in our KM efforts, stressing our design and problem solving strengths were far more valuable than being over-protective of what we had already accomplished.
As one who has passed the mythical boundary of usefulness in our competitive economy, I recently discovered I needed to return to work in order to stay useful and, perhaps more importantly, to stay sharp. Freelancing wasn’t making it for me. I’m just not ambitious enough, or in the right ways, to generate a useful income. I love what you’re doing, as well as what so many others we connect with are working on.
Keep up the good work, Harold. I want to continue paying attention – perhaps even contributing now and then – as long as possible.