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The Hub is all about breaking free from this outdated metaphor.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
