Bill Hobler wrote
>If I invest the fuits of my labor, and place them at risk,
>the receipient can generate income. Doesn't my risk earn some value?
I find this hard, because the way the system works, at the first sign of
trouble the risk money runs away - just look at the volatility of the
stockmarket. If Bill were to be in touch with a group of people who
needed capital and said OK I will invest my savings for five, ten or
twenty years, then that would certainly be a contribution to the
organisation, even though at any given point higher returns could always
be made elsewhere.
I tend to think of organisations as a social construct to allow a group of
people to achieve together dreams that they could not achieve as
individuals. We engage with a particular organisation because of that. I
think it is interesting that of what appear to have been more successful
economies in recent times, Japan has low labour mobility, and quite low
capital mobility, Germany (until reunification with its own problems) has
very low capital mobility, but our UK and US economies pride themselves in
high capital and high labour mobility.
Bill's concept of risk really seems to be playing a part here, as high
mobility equates to low risk IMHO.
Bill also writes
>Employee owned firms can be included in your list. Some of these have
>been succesful and some not. It seems success is correlated to the
>amouunt of business process ownership invested in the worker owners.
I agree, although we do have to be careful about how we define success -
in their terms or someone else's.
When I listen to LO speakers, they often say something on the lines of 'of
course the business has to make money etc. even though that is not the
prime purpose of the business' Why? if the real purpose of the business is
to allow the employees to achieve their dreams, not to satisfy the needs
of risk capital.
In the spirit of enquiry
Malcolm Jones
Productivity Europe Ltd
UK
prodeuro@atlas.co.uk (Malcolm Jones)
--prodeuro@atlas.co.uk (Malcolm Jones)
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>