Following up on my previous post on old incumbents and a new world: Where can we find harbingers of what is to come in Corporations 2.0?
The Hub, where fluidminds is taking part might be one answer. It's
the first serious attempt to break free from the industrial paradigm
we've been living with for the last 300 years. We build multinational
companies the same way today as we did when large companies need to
stash large amount of capital to invest in large factories and had to
employ massive amount of people to operate these large organizations.
This
isn't true any more. The biggest part of the balance sheet in almost
any company today consists of knowledge capital. This capital mainly
resides in the heads of individuals and in cheap portable computers.
All this capital is connected through a free global network; the
Internet. Supporting systems and functions are developed in an Open
Source environment yielding an almost endless flow of cheap or free
solutions to support the work of this global network.
Despite this, all multinational companies are build as the old metaphor was still true!
The
Hub is all about breaking free from this outdated metaphor. The Hub is
about building the first truly multinational company consisting of only
individual entrepreneurs. Individuals sharing the same vision and
values. Individuals sharing a passion for doing good for the world
through their professional deed. This global network can act much like
an amoeba; One day it's just 100 000 individual companies doing there
own thing. Another day the network acts as one global "company". This
global "company" can approach institutions like the United Nation and
compete head to head with companies like McKinsey and General Electric
for global contracts. Work that will be delivered through thousands of
individual entrepreneurs and invoiced to the customer as one company.
A
network like the Hub will be hard to defeat. As we are all individual
entrepreneurs we care ourselves for our professional development and
our high standard of quality when we deliver. No need for large,
expensive internal systems to track this. We take our salary in the
currency we prefer. For some a monetary compensation is most important.
For others currencies such as time to reflect, train new skills or
spend time on charity is much more important. We, as individual
entrepreneurs decide ourselves. No need huge centralized, bureaucratic
systems to manage this. We all rely on open source developed systems
for our tools - available to all. We don't need huge, expensive
internal development departments developing closed systems for our use
only.
/kent