The Next Organizational Entity - Looking Ahead

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The Next Organizational Entity - Looking Ahead

This article was written by Douglas Castle for The Global Futurist (http://theglobalfuturist.blogspot.com/) with an expression of appreciation and admiration for the mission of THE NATIONAL NETWORKER COMPANIES (http://www.thenationalnetworker.com/). It has been my privilege, as well as my labor, to witness what can happen when good people get together to accomplish a goal. This "high-speed organizational evolution") has actually made me dizzy. 

THE COOPERATIVE BUSINESS COMMUNITY - THE NEXT ORGANIZATIONAL ENTITY

The next productive organizational entity will be the Cooperative Business Community, and not the corporation or solo entrepreneur. These are not going to be "communes" in any traditional political or religious sense -- they have nothing to do with socialism collectivism or any other pidgeonholing -isms at all. They are beginning to grow in petri dishes everywhere. These petri dishes are being termed "social media platforms and groups."

They have been spawned by the internet, large corporate malfeasance, the expanding reality of internationalism, the lower cost of communications and of a need for an alternative to the paradoxically high risks of both middle-management corporatism and isolated solopreneurism.

This will be happening in phases:

1. The expansion of interpersonal contact networks and interdependencies through inexpensive communications, multiple contact forums and platforms, and the acceptance of e-commerce and open-sourcing (the "wiki" growth methodology) as the norm;

2. The necessary pooling of resources (through subcontracting, outsourcing, partnerships and "mastermind groups" in order for any one party to produce any goods or services for any other party. This is true of every industrialized nation.

3. The need for diversified revenue streams in order to ensure against the disaster of a single business failure, and the need for a relatively large group size in order to take advantage of vendor quantity discounts, and to qualify for reduced healthcare costs, such as insurance.

In brief, it starts with talking; it progresses to trading, and it results in sharing.

To repeat the three steps (and watch them occur during the course of the next three to five years):

•  TALKING
•  TRADING
•  SHARING

Through my affiliation with THE NATIONAL NETWORKER COMPANIES and Newsletter (http://www.thenationalnetworker.com/) , I am watching this trend as it unfolds in many places throughout the world. This progression of re-entitization (a Lingovation!) is not unprecedented. It is the logical result of crossing 1) Maslow's Heirarchy of Human Needs with 2) a long period of economic, political and institutional instability.

I found it very natural when a colleague suggested to me that The National Networker was neither merely a publisher, nor merely a services provider...it was becoming a community. And taking this one step further with a retrospective eye on feudalism and fiefdoms, I believe that this new type of productive organizational structure and its alteration to the landscape of civilization is on its way. Tribalism dates back many centuries, but it is still a nnatural Human propensity, whether it is Lord of the Flies, The Clan of the Cave Bear or Mad Max. The principal difference is that this conversion to Cooperative Communities does not need a major war, harsh environment or natural disaster to precipitate it. The recent economic meltdown, combined with the available communications and data processing technology are sufficient catalysts to move the formation of this new type of entity forward.

Some of the alternatives are nightmarish scenarios.

Faithfully,

Douglas Castle