The promise of Co-capitalism
We've nearly lost touch with value in today's economy. And we've nearly lost touch with ourselves.
Business today feels mostly like a gotcha. Free email services bilk you for your data, and we're fine with it: whatever.
As we wonder why it is so hard to breathe.
More and more people are waking up to a new ideal of living life for pleasure and passion rather than settle for security and ever-elusive "success."
You don't have to arrive. You are there. You are here. You're holding it together and making the most of it.
But what if we could have it all? What if our paycheck did come from something we loved? What if we were supported and encouraged to find ourselves, be ourselves and thrive with our core, rather than continue stretching to make ourselves into someone else's mold?
There is a way, a set of ways that we can accomplish all this together. For ourselves.
We call it co-capitalism.
Imagine all the awareness and best intentions of socialism, of charity, of benevolence – those outcomes empowered by a profit-driven, value obsessed system of group-controlled economic organizations. Democratic, free-market collective entrepreneurs who align on accomplishing something for society. Worker-owners, driven by profit that scales to their efforts, rewarding value.
A handful of billion-dollar organizations have tapped into this type of synergy, albeit as an exception. Rigid hierarchy is just so much easier. It's second nature. Birds do it. Dogs do it. Hierarchy is pre-human. And it's sorely lacking. We know it internally.
Across the arc of humanity, we've striven and progressed toward autonomy, democracy and fulfillment for all yearning for a balance between the individual and collective good. We know the answers. We have systems to practice what we preach. We just need a nudge.
And to die.
Ask anyone who has jumped toward being away from security: This switch requires abandoning everything you cling to for security. You've been told you can't be happy. You can't get your way. You are not enough and you're not ok.
Your nervous system is locked in fight or flight because you self-abandoned decades ago, building an ego framework that you try to use to explain why you can't be happy, as you feed it dopamine and make vain efforts at self-soothing.
But no matter how you try to quench that voice, it's screaming out. No. You deserve you.
You've woken up this far. Together we can make the solutions a lasting reality.
Facets of co-capitalism are reflected in scrum, fractional work and major corporate org charts. In my recent conversations with hundreds of people, we all sense this zeitgeist. This stuff is happening – giving it a name helps us talk about what we're talking about.
Co-capitalism: Profit-driven enterprise, owned and led by self-managed teams focused on maximizing the value proposition for themselves and customers.
In How to Fire Your Boss we look at specific examples of co-capitalist trends and its distinct fundamentals, based on three major pillars of agency, value and alignment.
Agency: control and direction
You have every reason to question the traditional hierarchy at your workplace. No, it's not personal at all – it's not who your boss is – it's the hierarchical model that is fundamentally flawed. This is how the dynamics differ: In the traditional model, bosses try to get you to do what the chain of command thinks the company should do for the margin. The top relies on everyone below to produce according to the top's plans. Every link in this chain is a limitation and liability. While it keeps us from chaos, the command structure is rife with silos and bottlenecks. And down deep, we all know it. The setup stifles the free market economy by failing to reward you based on the true value you create. Instead of compensating you for your contributions, the framework ties your worth to your 40 hours, treating your time as if it were owned as company direction is dictated to you – tasked in someone else's service as profits favor the powerful.
This is a lot to sacrifice in the name of coordination and control. We can do better ourselves, together. In more robust, democratic models like Mondragón, the group crowdsources ideation and way-finding. We shift the control aspect of the traditional boss to be shared by the whole, spreading out the responsibilities of coordinating and co-managing each other with robust and balanced backstopping, transparent oversight and feedback. Aligned, self-managed and empowered co-bosses that relate more like peers than parent-children.
Value: the secret sauce
This is where you come in – right now, as you are. You know you have untapped potential. You probably want to be doing something else for this world. Or know you could do what you love in a better way. Or, you want to find out what the heck that thing would be if you let yourself think this way again. Flame that fire because this is the driver for your prosperity. What do you want?
We know absolute power corrupts absolutely. A little too much power still corrupts. By establishing equal footing, these group models work with – rather than against – the sticky facets of the human condition like self-interest. The whole group having both control and ownership resolves the despotism of the margin-squeezed hierarchical world, where we fight each other for the zero-sum scraps and are never satisfied.
Interestingly, it's the alignment of this same self-interest that drives group-based ownership models. What you want to do for your bottom line and how you want to pursue that – this is the fuel and fire to drive success. The direct connection between value creation and revenue will jack both your morale and productivity. And the result is money. Happy money. For all of us.
Everyone takes a share of risk, control and rewards – a dynamic that extends the incentives of the free-market economy to every worker through revenue and ownership sharing. The more successful, effective, and valuable your work is, the more money you make.
An empowered group of value-aligned workers could potentially rack up compounding efficiencies to gain as much as 10X or more in competitive advantages over the arcane dynamics that slow businesses of every size, from the mega-corporations, to nearly every startup and even a three-person mom-and-pop. There is a profound business case for these changes.
Alignment: interconnection, communication and culture
As we each seek to maximize our value creation, we need well designed structures and tools for concentrating our efforts – otherwise we'd descend into chaos or end up as rogue entrepreneurs.
We achieve this with an interconnected team structure that is vastly more resilient and adaptive than the top-down tree. It removes weak links with fallbacks, buttressing connections and obliterating bottlenecks. Open communication and buy-in make these systems work, but also makes them superior. When the full team has opportunity to help shape policy, everyone is already read in: automatic buy-in. Information doesn't have to travel up and down the chain. Consider if you could nix the years you've wasted on mind-numbing meetings that recycled presentations among all the tiers of bosses-reports.
The fundamentals shift dramatically within these group dynamics. Imagine the effects of a system where your earnings are directly linked to the value you contribute. Working with partners rather than bosses means collaborating with self-motivated individuals who bring passion to their projects. In such an environment, burnout diminishes because your efforts are acknowledged and rewarded proportionally. You help steer the course and you gain the freedom to define your own work-life balance. If you can produce ten times more, you have the option to work a tenth as much or personally profit that much more.
Open voting levels the playing field and ensures all the voices are heard. Operating in these team organizations, humans are their best selves, as they are. Working together becomes vibrant and enjoyable, not drudgery. That joy extends through the product value to the customer and the world. Fun money.
Society is at a crossroads. On one hand: Margin-obsessed corporate conglomerates are pushing to use AI and our data to make the cheapest products that we'll cave to buy under an onslaught of ever-present advertising that follows us through every digital experience, driving us into doomscrolling shells of ourselves.
But, on the other hand: We're on the verge of a monumental shift to address the big issues, eliminating toxic workplace hangups and empowering ourselves to step into the benefits of a vibrant creator culture, with and without AI.
More and more organizations are finding ways to profit by melding collective team organizational ideas with a business-first mindset. Billion-dollar companies have figured out that decentralized organization can benefit their people and improve revenue. And they do a better job of making money per employee.
"A growing number of organizations are seeking ways to organize less hierarchically in the hopes of becoming more innovative, nimble, and enriching places to work," write Harvard Business School fellows Michael Y. Lee and Amy C. Edmondson.
Though commonplace, the hierarchical system of top-down control breeds inefficiency, stifles creativity and hampers the motivative forces of a free-market economy within and beyond company walls. Every link in the chain of command is a liability and a bottleneck. So many of our complaints in the workplace are actually related to hierarchy, a natural default we seize on to save us from chaos.
We blame the bosses, but get this, they aren't a necessary evil: They aren't evil people and with the right coordination, they're not necessary. Despite hierarchy's prevalence, there's increasing evidence that our common experiences are driving a sea change to better approaches that focus on building value with self-managed business frameworks. Cross-team scrum processes now commonplace in software development are spreading to other industries and being adopted on the organizational level. There are efforts like shoe giant Zappos and gaming creator Valve, both of which operate on collective organizational models that provide waypoints toward smarter, more team-oriented work solutions. In the crypto space, decentralized autonomous organizations have developed self-management using blockchain technology. Fractional work and collective resource-sharing are all the rage and business-minded cooperatives are popping up across the country with structures that fix the workplace problems caused by hierarchy.
While co-op organizations have existed on the fringes for ages, we're modernizing these ideas to flow into the mainstream and build better systems for working and earning. Let's look at how we can fully reshape corporate frameworks, centered on a value-based mission with proven, team-driven organizational structures, incentivized to their cores with free-market principles. A group of aligned, self-organized and empowered co-entrepreneurs – without a boss – is unstoppable.
This goes way beyond how to have a good meeting. It's about you being a better person for yourself, your family and your world – through your work. That's what is on the table here, the very nature of work – and of commerce.
Efforts to improve capitalism fall short when organizations take their eyes of the central tenant of free-market commerce.
Co-capitalism is about fostering an environment where individuals, driven by their self-interests and creative passions, contribute in ways that are naturally aligned with the good of the group – selling value. That's how we make money, that's what gets us up in the morning. Self-actualization of fulfilling one’s potential leads to contributions that serve others. Win-win-win.
Value becomes a core functional part of the organization rather than window dressing, whitewashing, or lip service to the common good. This transformative approach to business ethics is rooted in intrinsic motivation and a genuine commitment to the greater good. By starting with recognition that good value is what will make money, we can fundamentally resolve the conflict, a redemptive focus on profit and people.
Similarly, the previous alternatives to capitalism like communism and socialism failed because they were built on incomplete constructs of how things should be rather than a market reality of how things are, amounting to bankrupt mandates and whining cries for fair shares as benefits went to corrupted power brokers. Just like they do in graft 'capitalism'.
Rather than going down the failed road of "everyone gets a cut of the pie" simply for existing, co-capitalism provides the opportunity for anyone who steps up to _earn_ their share based on the value they create. Co-capitalism creates a truer free-market than graft capitalism or the alternatives. The measure of this value, the KPI here, is money. You get money for building things that people pay money for. This is an opportunity to do it the way we always said it should be done, together. It's democracy for making money.
What we're talking about here offers a bridge, a third way in the evolution of capitalism into a more robust, individually-aware, value-first business paradigm, galvanized in every aspect by the synergy of profit and people.
The old way is passé
Leading the Joint Special Operations Task force in Iraq in 2004, General Stanley McChrystal found himself in need of a new way of operating. The realities of military engagement had shifted so much that the old hierarchical framework, the very backbone of military command and control, was failing to serve soldiers and achieve the objectives on the ground. The structure was too ridged, too limited and too abstract to respond to a dynamic and uncertain battlefield.
"We had to tear down familiar organizational structures and rebuild them along completely different lines, swapping our sturdy architecture for organic fluidity, because it was the only way to confront a rising tide of complex threats," McChrystal writes in _Team of Teams_, describing his experiences of overhauling the control structure.
Moving away from the fixed, top-down framework, his team worked instead to establish fully transparent information flow and decentralized decision making, empowering units on the ground to act more on their own and interconnecting them with each other, providing adaptive and robust organization and communications.
"Almost everything we did ran against the grain of military tradition and of general organizational practice," he writes. "We abandoned many of the precepts that had helped establish our efficacy in the twentieth century, because the twenty-first century is a different game with different rules."
McChrystal goes on to apply his experiences to today's workplace, highlighting the benefits of a team over the traditional centralized corporate command approach. "The competitive advantage of teams is their ability to think and act as a seamless unit," he writes.
McChrystal's findings resonate with facets of the scrum practice in software development, where self-organized, cross-functional teams tackle development issues. Scrum originated in the 1990s and has become one of the most popular agile development frameworks worldwide. The emphasis on collaboration, flexibility and continuous improvement has led to more efficient and responsive project management. Organizations using scrum report significant improvements in product quality, team morale and customer satisfaction. It's become widely adopted beyond software creation, with companies now applying scrum tactics in finance, healthcare and education.
If you've ever been enthused by jumping into a project or cross-team endeavor that suspended the reporting structure, you may have identified what makes the difference. Even major public corporations like Whole Foods have explored facets team benefits and pushed against some the problems of top-down control, adopting aspects of changes that are a step toward group solutions.
Even within hierarchical structures, the successes of smaller team approaches pave the way for broadening the concepts to whole-organization thinking. What we're talking about here is uprooting the tiered hierarchical tree from the office org chart and shifting the management aspects of bosses to fully shared group processes.
There are billion-dollar companies that have reached success though these group structures. Some alternatives describe a flat model, but that still smacks of a top over the whole and feels inefficient as a metaphor. Instead, as an ideal, I picture a galaxy model with interconnected nodes, workers, of equal or proportional weight, interacting in open, market-based partnerships. Starting with a co-written, value-based foundation and using common communication tools and applications, we have the means to distribute control among all of the worker-partners. Peer pressure has always been more effective than parenting; we can build and capitalize on that dynamic.
There is a huge potential to accomplish good with these frameworks. And a huge benefit for you personally. But first you have to forget the decades of stories you’ve told yourself and believe: You deserve to get what you want for doing what you want. You are worth it. And no one can stop you but you.
Ready?