Social Entrepreneurship.BIZ :: Entrepreneurs Building Society

If you get what you measure, then why not measure the best of all possible worlds?

I propose that the best of all possible worlds is universal happiness — and there seems to be strong evidence that universal happiness is closely linked to social cohesion.

The goal of this idea is to envision a world in which it becomes easier to integrate more and more people into the fabric of society — in order to give more and more members of society the sense of being a valuable part of their community.

Today, in most cases and in most locations worldwide, we do not really measure social cohesion — and in many cases social cohesion is not promoted in any way at all. In most cases across the globe, we evaluate individuals.

I wish to propose a “new deal” — a new new deal… let’s call it Norbert’s New Deal!

The plan is actually incredibly simple — We simply add a new metric: Group evaluation. There is no need to do away with the evaluation of individuals… if we wish to promote community spirit and social cohesion, then we can simply do so by motivating and incentivizing people to focus more on the performance and evaluation of teams and teamwork than exclusively on individual performance evaluations.

To make this more tangible, consider a company and the people who work to earn a living at that company. If we focus only on the wages and salaries (and ignore the return on capital investment for the time being), then we could — for example — entertain the following two scenarios:

• A: 10 Workers earn $100,000 each

• B: 10 Workers earn $1,000,000 as a group

It may appear as though these two cases are roughly equivalent — but let me add another caveat: Imagine that the 10 “cooperative” workers (B) were happier than the 10 “competitive” workers (A) — which, at this point, I want you to simply assume as a “hypothetical given”.

Let me elaborate this example a little more. Imagine now that we were talking about larger companies, and that each company had 10 such working groups (A0-A9 and B0-B9), and that whereas the competitive company also had an additional 11 managers (M0-M9 to manage each working group and a CEO to manage M0 to M9), the cooperative company were managed by each of the working groups sending any one of their members to represent the group in management meetings (R0-R9), and that they did not use any CEO at all.

This raises 2 interesting issues:

1. Whereas the competitive company A must pay 111 people, the cooperative company B must pay only 100 people.

2. Whereas the competive company A has 1 chief to give direction, the cooperative company B has no one to provide an “executive” direction for the company.

Let me address point #2 first, as this seems to be a rather critical point from the perspective of traditional management theory.

In my opinion, I need not give an explanation for how such a competitive company A would be managed, because almost all companies that exist today are managed in this way — more or less well, as can easily by studied in countless books on topics related to management theory, advice, etc.

How would a cooperative company be managed? My answer to this is quite simple: the “owners” (i.e., the capital investors) would simply set goals for the company to achieve, and the cooperative teams would simply accept these goals as a “given” — and simply attempt to achieve these goals as best as possible (I will say more about the relationship between owners and workers later).

Regarding the matter of wages and salaries, we now have:

• Competitive A: 111 X 100,000 = 11,100,000

• Cooperative B: 100 X 111,000 = 11,100,000

So ceteris paribus (“all else equal”) cooperative workers earn 11% more than competitive workers — this could be one reason why cooperative workers might be happier than competitive workers.

Another reason why cooperative workers might be happier than competitive workers is that in the cooperative scenario there is no “big boss man” who rules over them the way managers do in the competitive scenario.

Yet my hunch is that the main reason why cooperative workers would be happier than competitive workers is that the would need to talk more and interact more directly with one another instead of needing to adhere to an organizational hierarchy that imposes rules and regulations on their communicative behavior and their interactions within the groups they are supposed to interact with, but only according to the “organizational culture” which is not actually explicitly stated anywhere, but rather is something that must be implicitly divined via some kind of magical intuition (cf. also this video about “inner work life” — in particular the point about “solitary smugness” @ 22:30).

Yet even if neither the second or third reasons are deemed valid, the simple fact that cooperative workers earn 11% more than competitive workers is an obvious and indisputable reason why cooperative workers might be happier than competitive workers (incidentally, the 11% number is obviously just from this example — if we use another example with different group sizes, then the number would be different… but the positive impact remains the same).

Now let me tie up 1 loose end: In this model, all workers are assumed to earn the same amount. Although this was the starting point of this example, it is not really necessary. The way I would actually “configure” workers earnings would be to default to equal earnings for all — and to change that if and only if the working group in question unanimously agrees on a different distribution. I could imagine many cases in which a team might unanimously decide to redistribute the earnings differently. I could also imagine scenarios under which the earnings are distributed equally, and then individual team members might voluntarily redistribute their earnings to other team members for a wide variety of reasons.

Lastly, I would say the one point at which I would nonetheless feel a contractual relationship is important in the cooperative company is with respect to minimum/maximum payout (perhaps as a percentage of total revenues) to the capital investors, the workers, and also to any “fringe benefits” such as health insurance. Beyond such contractual arrangements, I would say that anyone would be free to participate or not as suits them best. For example: if the capital investors are not happy with their return on investment, they could “cash out” their stake in the operation. Likewise, participation in such group projects can be seen as entirely voluntary and each group could decide to include / exclude members as it deems best for the group (and thereby also best for the members of the group).

I hope my introductory sketch of a new new deal inspires you to think more about such possibilities — and to consider it as an invitation to share your thoughts and ideas!

Social Entrepreneurship News Post Forum