How We Work
"It might be better to jump to the hyperdemocracy in which the people that do the work plan it, execute it, and then rate their performance."

Stowe Boyd
On his LinkedIn page, Stowe Boyd, describes himself as focusing on "the ecology of work and the anthropology of the future." He is concerned that today’s oligarchic business lacks speed, agility, and resilience.
"The short version:
- The oldest form of organizational psychology is Competitive. That’s the most feudal internally. Power is used coercively by the ‘king’ executive and his elite, and others do what they are told or else. The structure is top-down command-and-control: a strict hierarchy.
- Today’s corporate model is the Collaborative: the executive elite drive strategy and operations, but engage in an on-going and extensive process of consensus building as a central part of the narrative of enactment. The structure is a flattened, matrixed hierarchy with a great deal of lateral interaction of the members, and increased level of involvement and power-sharing between formal and informal leaders.
- The emerging corporate model is Cooperative: the company is a non-hierarchical network, where a constitution defines the rights and responsibilities in a relational model, and influence is social. All members are ‘owners’, in some degree, of the work being done, and this confers authority differentially, and not directly because of legal ownership. Most critically, each individual and team operates on the premise that they ‘own’ their own work, and that others have only indirect influence on the processes and practices applied. The power structure is decentralized, and a laissez-faire model prevails, since people work in voluntary associations, largely autonomously.
"A useful characterization of the cooperative business is fast-and-loose: a cooperative business is more agile because the strongest ties of earlier organizational models — those between the supervised and the supervisor — are broken, and supervision is replaced by circumvision: the peer influence and review of work." - Stowe Boyd
Article: Today’s Business Organization is an Oligarchy, and That Needs to Change
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