Anybody want to help create (and work at) a place like Valve, but for everything and way better?

wrath
28

Yes, I see the problem in the way I was stating it. Change you own world, let others join in.

I can still see potential for confusion there. As well as potential advantage. Only thing to do then, is resolve the confusion.

Would be good to make a very, very definite point of providing one or more strong examples of specifically non-gamer, non-IT seeds to make it clear. And even place that example a bit more prominently to avoid ever creating that confusion to begin with. It won’t harm any prospects for that seed, but would widen the field going in.

And, after all, if there’s decisive preference for earth-friendly? It’s almost a non-starter with the software producers - because there already is almost nothing more earth-friendly than going virtual - be that games or business management systems or your to-do list.

29

Hmm, yeah. I see your point.

Maybe if we just gave quick blurbs about a few seed examples and only go into lots of detail with one?

Maybe something like an eco-friendy group that also runs a no-kill animal rescue shelter, lives on a chunk of land that was once destroyed but they can proudly say they helped return nature to, has connected that shelter to a foster program that lets children visit, help, and learn valuable lessons, loves dancing around bonfires and has a weekly get together where they all smoke weed and try to resolve their most complicated problems?

The key is to point out that when a seed gets more specific it may appeal to less people, but to those it DOES appeal to it starts getting progressively more and more appealing, especially as you start letting the groups get creative on how they’re interacting.

So, instead of one generic solution that a few hundred million people feel ‘meh’ about, you have potentially have a few million very heavily customized lives that are tuned for us and have to compete for us by being even more appealing than whatever we have now. I think that’s where most of the potential comes from, and I want to communicate that well . . . though I’m not sure how much to go into it in the ‘handbook’ and how much should be supplemental.

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30

Yes - I see your point. Although - if you want to locate that eco-friendly animal-rescuing bonfire-dancing crowd? Already exists. It’s called ‘Portlandia’, lol.

But yes - if we visualized it, I think it would look a bit like an hourglass with an extremely wide top and bottom. The purpose and mission statement sit as the narrowest part of the hourglass. That doesn’t imply that it is confined or confining, but only that it is well-defined. The top wold represent all the possible people who could be interested and supportive. The bottom, all the seeds.

We can say, ‘6 billion people’, and that’s fine. Not all will fit. But ultimately, you’d want just as many as possible to at least see the possibility of fitting into one of those seeds, even if it didn’t happen immediately, even if that seed doesn’t yet exist. So, you keep the public-facing part of that center just as broadly appealing as possible. And, you let the possibilities with seeds look just as limitless as it possibly, possibly can - because not one of us can possibly predict the Next Great Idea.

Sure, in the beginning? Not too many grains fall through to the bottom end. That’s fine. That’s even desirable. All you’re doing is demonstrating concepts for now, so that those ‘grains’ can get the ideal and carry their own balls eventually.

So, of the possible seed ideas, you could score them roughly - a straight-up list of desirable characteristics in terms of ultimate benefits, and straight up count of those available with each seed idea. Doesn’t mean one is ‘better’ - only means the top score has the best chances of attracting interest AND ultimately providing benefit.

Present in that order, and for those reasons only. Because, some of this is unquantifiable - how it makes us feel when we think about it, how far we might go to achieve it, finite resources required and produced…we could go nuts trying. But the other stuff? That, we can count and apply strict logic to.

Make sense?

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31

Yeah. Hmm.

So. . .we want . .

  1. The employee handbook (unless there’s a better idea out there) to be tuned towards appealing to the sort of people we’d want to employ in that first stage and would take to it easily rather than grumble about it . . . so maybe less there on the huge picture and more on the practical short term.

  2. A good pitch for possible investors and somebody (or somebodies) who can deliver that pitch.

  3. Better organized supplemental documentation for the nuts and bolts (and examples)

  4. A document/site that explains all the other benefits from the standpoints of people-saving, pure charity, and that sort of thing that gets into the subtleties.

Does that sound about right?

I was thinking we could eventually put more focus on the more revolutionary perspective (since it’s about the only nonviolent way we can break away from this crazy government and economic system we have), but I’d rather not do that until after we’ve started rolling. There’s too much negativity in that approach and I’d rather hold off on that until we’ve snatched up all the people who are more easily motivated by positive emotions, that helps get people who can more easily raise that bar and keep us on track during the early evolutionary process IMHO.

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32

Yes! Exactly. Each of those pieces explain a part of it in ways that will appeal and be understandable to those reading.

I am thinking of the employee handbook mostly as kind of a welcome note - giving the general overview, saying hi, and welcoming them to participate if they are so moved. It’s less the ‘rules’, and more the explanation of how it runs, what the culture is, and kind of how to get along in it all, rather than, as you say, the ‘nuts and bolts’ stuff. If it can help organize our own thinking more clearly, it’ll help guide the creation of those other essential documents without any one of them being too overwhelming - both to us, and to the eventual readers. If they reject on the basis of the general philosophy or organization? Fine! Let them. But, let it also lead the rest to come a little further into this world. If it arouses their interest enough, they’ll want to explore further, just as you have intended.

Does that make sense?

And, I agree as to avoiding any sense of being political revolutionaries. More…a branching out and innovation within what already exists. That’s a positive message, and doesn’t take a militant or oppositional stance that would arouse suspicion and rejection. And really, it more in line with the general idea, anyway. You don’t tell everyone you’ve bought a new car, and then mess up that news with miserable tales of how you had to take a bus or hitchhike everywhere last year, right? Just share the good news, and your new pals may want to hop in and take a spin!

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33

It would be useful and wise to look into wholly-employee-owned companies. There are a few, and there are a few BIG ones, too. There are probably some lessons there to heed.

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34

Like Mondragon? :smile:

They’ve come up a lot, I’ve become a bit of a fan!

There are a couple of others that I personally liked, like Olivetti, and there are some less business/more sustainable guys out there like the Valhalla Movement that seem to be really good examples of the sort modernity-friendly cooperative enthusiasm I’d like to tap (though put to more profitable use!)

Love more good examples if you’ve got any! This whole thing’s kind of woven together from a lot of other things, many with more than one aspect implemented (so the Venn diagram is more like a spirograph).

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35

There’s another big one with a short name and I can’t remember. It’s either Gore (as in Gore Tex) or Bose or 3M or something like that. One of those is, as far as I can remember, wholly employee-owned, with a plebiscite-elected CEO and board on set terms of service, for reasonable salary bonuses and they still have to do something like 1/2 of their regular job they got hired for, if I recall. Anyways, I’ll research it so I’m not just blowing smoke. But I do remember one of these big companies standing apart in terms of governance.

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36

I don’t think it’s 3M, though they had an excellent campus in Minnesota that had some other elements I like (Excellent production and research facilities with a number of on-campus living facilities and a couple of live-in suite type hotels that’s nearly adjacent}

But you’ve got me intrigued! That ‘generally flat but still quite good’ salary structure,seems to be a common element here as well!

37

There was SAIC, but I don’t think they are employee owned any more.

38

Yeah, that’s pretty much it.

It’s not just that ‘positive messages are good’, there’s a lot of science behind the approach too. You don’t create a productive dynamo by sprinkling in the drama queens and you don’t create good environments for people to live in when people can’t relax a bit and trust each other . . . we don’t need people looking for conspiracies at every corner either, it kind of makes it hard to talk policy.

The people who we start with are setting the bar for everybody else, so we definitely want to use that philosophy in our design. We don’t want to go all politically correct or anything, far from it, we want people to be able to be a bit snarky without worrying that somebody’s going to flip out and hold it over them forever.

I’m hoping the focus helps us cluster that general collection of people who can work/play/live well together, generally be worthy of each others’ collective trust, and who can invent/create/automate/produce in the sorts of leaps and bounds that we want. We can worry about everybody else once we’ve run out of people willing to take that jump, and the bigger we get the more specifically appealing options can be created and the more we appeal to people who would have been skeptical before. Then we worry about everyone else when we’ve given all of them job offers, right?

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39

Yes, exactly. Always good to keep the large picture in view, but just as important to maintain focus on matters at hand. Otherwise? That larger picture starts looking more and more floaty…and more and more like pie, lol.

Also, agree fully as to the weirdos/happy mutants of the world. They are the inventors and artists and scientists and techs who are so very needed. Granted, some of those love a good conspiracy theory - whether to believe in, or to laugh at. But that’s a pastime, usually, and should be seen that way.

Can’t thank you enough, man! I so needed to pull away from news forums and idle chatter! You may not be an ‘organizer’, but you’re hella ‘priortizer’ and ‘humanizer’! Super-powers, indeed, lol.

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40

Awww, thanks! I make up for it by being REALLY BAD at organizing things! I’ve been a source of amusement in past lives for that.

Yeah, I think there’s a good line there, and it does go kind to attitude. It’s how willing you are to do without the negative side, right? We should be able to be as wacky as we want if we’re being positive and sincere.

Meanwhile, the more positive happy mutants are often freakin’ awesome and you can sprinkle a few of those in any environment and make it richer by their addition, there are just some of those guys who are so enthusiastic you can’t help but get caught up in it.

Maybe that’s a way to sell it, like a drama-free gaming group/guild, a Geek island that’s designed to invite almost everyone to play, a MAKEtopia, that sort of thing? Maybe this is where we’d have several different entry points leading to the same place so they can frame things in ways that work best for them?

I think a lot of people will take to it just fine once the option is available, stable, and well populated . . . but we don’t need to tune so much for them now. This is preaching to the choir on one hand and selling an uber-Skunkworks on the other

Also, MANY updates and split out the seed creation bit into it’s own little manual.

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41

Cool!

And yes, I could see some multi-pronged marketing being a good thing, eventually. Some of that approach would work toward recruitment of said happy mutants on the inside, and some geared toward the investor end. That group can also have various pet reasons for finding this to be…awesome. Maybe, some just like creative business opportunities, while others are more humanitarian, and others more eco-oriented. It would possible to create a list of possible approaches, and then develop scripts for each. I do not see it as anything less than the most honest outreach - this thing is, after all, many-faceted. It’s ok that others have their own pet interests. So do we.

One neat thing about this is, most traditional companies get all involved in the ‘branding’ hullabaloo these days. That’s a little tougher here, though I’m sure there can be a slogan or motto and logo developed at some point. But, none of those is likely to tell the whole story in a nutshell, so most likely it will require a bit of storytelling to fill out the picture for most. That’s ok. It can be done. It’s just tougher with conglomerates, which this is. Simple branding can be done down at a product or single seed level - it’s just a bit more involved at the top of the org chart, with something like this. And there is no benefit in copycatting anything presently in existence. Those guys are whole lot of the reason this thing is taking shape in the first place, lol. But- important to remember that they are used to seeing things in certain formats - business plans, mission statements…that sort of thing. (None of those are bad ideas, btw. They don’t dictate content. They are merely formats like a letter or a spreadsheet, or any other document. They merely provide a framework for organizing business ideas conceptually - and specifically so that investors and bankers can understand what’s going on.)

It’s kind of necessary to keep that in mind, because without it, they will likely have some trouble understanding this at all.

Will look at the new docs shortly.

Edited to add: MAKEtopia = luvvvvv! Great way to put it!

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42

Yup, you’re hitting on where we need the help now!

I’ve done all the things that I’m good at and have had some great help from a few friends, and I think it’s quite a lot. Design-wise it’s simple, solid, abusively powerful, and very flexible. . . and it’s pretty much made to keep rewriting itself until it can make itself obsolete. Nobody’s come close to shooting a hole in it for a year because we just end up incorporating the bullets into the whole web of ideas.

It’s not so much mine or something we created as something that kind of assembled itself without much help, and it’s gotten all the help it can from a tiny number of us but it needs a broader range of skills to finish. I honestly feel like I’m in a ‘Finch helping the Machine’ situation and it really needs a Reese and maybe even a Root. (If you’re a Person of Interest fan, that actually is a weirdly good analogy the more I think about it. Also, great show)

This is way too good, too much fun, and helps too many people to sit here languishing in a few heads and on sites that don’t get read It deserves a few people to help run this across the finish line.

43

I was correct about Gore, Ltd… but there are MANY to learn from. Granted, these are pretty much all traditional businesses with a majority stake employee-owned. It’s not our aim to be just another ESOP. We are more cooperative and with a generally-flat-but-incentivised-and-democratic structure, much more like a Co-op food store or something like that. But there are huge lessons to be learned here from these companies and this information, which can help us formulate our working plan better.

https://www.nceo.org/articles/employee-ownership-100

and also, an article, which I haven’t judged the merits of yet, since it’s long and I’m still reading it:

http://business.time.com/2013/11/19/can-employee-owned-companies-reboot-the-economy/

The top link to NCEO is a great place to get more info on governance and employee participation in traditional companies.

As far as your idea for how to launch, I would love to participate in a small BOARD of leaders. I think that a distributed leadership would be a perfect mirror for what we are trying to do. We can divide leadership of the sections, and meet as a group to make the big decisions. (We can of course pre-specify what are to be considered big decisions and what are small ones, so that individual leaders aren’t getting power-hungry and turning our idea back into the same-old-same-old.)

The benefits of a CEO-less board are many:

• We will come together on equal ground.
• Nobody gets an exorbitant, disproportionate share of the organization, or has undue influence.
• Each member of the board brings their particular expertise, hopefully in diverse fields, and their unique perspectives.
• When addressing certain segments of society, the board can decide which member is to be the spokesperson to that group.
• We get to decide things together, and work as a cohesive unit, rather than looking to one individual to make the big decisions and absolve us of responsibility. (Which makes our task harder, because WE are responsible.)
• Comings and goings of members won’t affect the company irreparably, and there will be no big golden parachutes to suck the thing dry during handoffs.
• Employees will always have a shot at being among the leadership; it’s not an exclusive club.
• Transparency, since meetings are open, except for a few conditions we can pre-specify, such as a sensitive personnel or legal matter, which, for decency’s sake has to be dealt with in private and then reported on afterward.
• Gives us ample opportunity for divide-and-conquer strategy for most things
• Allows us to individually focus on our strengths, or some aspect of the organization that we want to apply ourselves to learning.
• Allows us to easily work within existing legal structures, such as LLC, INC or non-profit, until we define a new one.
• Demonstrates our spirit of plurality, our aversion to plutocracy, and our deep desire to help humanity.

And much, much more…

My vote is for a board! Right now, it looks like we’re 3. It would be useful to set a target maximum… say the first year as 5, then later on we could expand the board as there is more to do…

What say you?

~awjt

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44

Actually, that sounds like a pretty good approach as we get this thing off the ground.

We’d want to be clear that we’re heading further down that axis as we grow (less monolithic and more distributed), so even in the early stages we’d want there to be a lot of subject matter groups handling things on their own and very little that ends up percolating up to the board. Heck, we could even maintain that external view through quite a bit of internal growth, even if by that point our ‘board’ is just the externally facing view of our strategizing arm.

But we get that philosophy in there and I’m game, it’s got the appearance of being in the ‘fast and agile business’, which is a lot easier to explain to investors than some approaches I’ve seen cooperatives take, but since our internal governance will transcend them too from a ‘everybody is equal’ standpoint, I’m groovy. I’ve been learning that taking the appearance of something simple can be better than trying to explain all the details.

It’d be nice if we could get this so it could be the primary focus of some people ASAP, make it their job if possible. There’s a lot of potential to explore.

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45

Right. I view the “leader” less as directors and more as organizing factors.

Directors take the company vision and enforce it on the underlings, and try to percolate up productivity and results.

Organizing factors would advocate for the overall vision, of course, but act primarily as distributors of information, conduits for resource allocation, clarifiers on ideas, think tank leaders, direct participators in development, etc.

It’s a whole different way of thinking of leadership, where leadership isn’t top-down, but bottom-up. The sub-groups and working-groups charge their leader or representative with what to bring back to the board for consideration.

The trick is to divide tasks transparently. There are some things that boards are good for: writing and debating policies, defining budgets, accounting, organizational decisions such as physical locations, dealing with hiring, firing, legal, and a short list of a few other big picture things which the smaller groups are ill-suited for and don’t need to be pulled off-task to deal with. The board can be their cushion, so that there isn’t repetition among the working groups, say for legal issues, which would sap a company dry in a stiff instant.

But should the governing board DIRECT the specific methods of research and development efforts within any one group? 99.9% of the time that answer needs to be no. 0.1% of the time, a group might be wanting company resources to see if they can shoot grapes into space, and they have no good justification for such a pursuit.

In that rare case, the other groups, or representationally the board, should have the power to nix the grape idea and withhold resources for that ill choice of pursuits. And/or other working groups can nix those bad ideas, but a board is built for that kind of governance when occasionally local self-governance goes awry. Acting as a cushion, to preserve the rights of all within the organization, rather than being a director or dictator who preserves his or her own rights to remain in power over the company.

As I said, the trick is discerning these, and using each body to its strengths. 99.9% local working-group control, with 0.1% help from the board is how I am envisioning it working, in practical terms.

46

I think I’ve got a couple of dozen solutions to the problems that create themselves there. It’s come up a lot and often been a tertiary focus of what I’ve done career-wise. :slight_smile:

A few bits are already there, that firm hiring line helps us set the stage right off, and it’s one of the reasons why the ‘think more responsibly as you impact more people’ bit is one of the principles, because that reverses some of our current leadership issues (where more power = more get out of jail free cards). Transparency does need to be more visibly associated with that, I totally left that bit out.

I also think that by treating the board as ‘roles’ that can have anybody put in them (and that we can restructure at a whim) helps keep people from treating those roles like ‘theirs’ (self included). Besides, if we decide that we want to always have a random 12 year old present at meetings to keep us grounded then we should be able to do so, right? :smile:

It does help to get as many subtle psychologies in place as is possible, since the key is really to engineer the world around us to help us make good decisions. Heck, even just having that on the table is powerful, since that helps everyone else keep things flexible rather than clinging to something somebody wrote a long time ago in a different world.

I’m actually very comfortable with the options we have when it comes to managing what conflicts may arise and (more importantly) not creating most of them ourselves. I figure we can use the retroactive proxy system in ‘The Doctor’s Way’ to set the bar there and put it next to a consensus system and at least one other, vote between multiple options, and set up something that requires a periodic agreement on what top-tier system is used to handle the issues that bridge disparate groups.

47

As a side note, I’m kind of happy with how splitting out the employee/citizen/owner’s handbook and the seed-making guide is working, though I still have to do a lot of work in the seed side (to really hammer home how all the Dunbar’s Numberish-sized heavily customized groups can not just make something more appealing and comfortable, but also open up other opportunities to expand in particular!).

Also, has anybody seen this?

It’s very clever, but I think we can also leverage the fact that it makes it obvious how crappy the game that everybody has to play really is.

Perhaps something like that with a D- review would be helpful to show the benefit of other options?

Edit: Going back to the ‘how to do a really short description’ and keeping the focus away from all that is wrong with the world. . .

Could we describe it as this, for a living, and for everybody?


We can point out the profit to the investors, but for most people in the end the profit is a side effect of following passions rather than a motivating factor.