The Distributed Enterprise

The Distributed Enterprise is a model of a leaner, scalable organization with more responsibility and ethics than The Corporation. The Distributed Enterprise is also a Distributive Enterprise.

Problem Statement

Corporations as we know them are legalized irresponsibility (limited liability), responsible for ecocide, war, and genocide. Corporate structure facilitates such atrocities. For example, IBM sold business machines to concentration camps, companies pollute the environment, and the military's business model is death via taxation. We all participate in this scenario. There are various Critiques of the Corporation, which are prerequisite study to this. A solution lies in changing the rules of the game.

Solution

OSE proposes Distributed Enterprise. This is based on insights: that size of organizations matters (Small is Beautiful), that flexible production methods can be used rather than centralized production (The Second Industrial Divide), and learnings from Ghandian Economics that local production can oust invading colonials.

Raising the Bar

Distributive Enterprise is not easy. Instead of armies of line workers, the Distributive Enterprise requires a higher level of skill, and an integrated skill set. The operators do more complex tasks, are involved in making ethical business decisions, and have a high level of control over their business because of its manageable size. The requirement is nothing short of being an Integrated Human when running the enterprise.

Responsibility and Ethics

The smaller an enterprise, structurally, it has more tendencies towards accountability and ethics. In megacorporations, it is easy for one hand not to know what the other is doing. This is not to say that large corporations cannot have ethical leaders. But ethics easily break down when there are 'mouths to feed.' This is a traditional dilemma between security and freedom, and why most people choose security over freedom.

Training

Training emerges as a challenge. Today's education system and academia do not prepare individuals well for movement entrepreneurship, which a transition to the Open Source Economy requires. Thus the central question becomes: how do we train the distributive enterprise movement entreprenuers?

The training and onboarding time will have to be longer. An openness to learning is a critical feature of the student - as new, integrated skill sets spanning from cultural literacy, positive psychology, history, STEM, open source economics, management, and practical skills will be required.

This means that the breed of human that does this must go through a Tranformative Learning experience. It seems that nothing short of such experience will suffice to train the new 'workforce' of people who Buy Out at the Bottom.

End Goals

If people are trainable for Distributive Enterprise, that would be a preferred system to centralized economies. Thus, one of OSE's goals is to determine the feasibility of creating a world based on Distributive Enterprise. It's an experiment worth doing.