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The Collaborative Independent Creatives Scenario

Introduction

The idea is that tasks requiring a substantial element of creativity will account for a larger proportion of gross world product, and that these will be decoupled from the kind of work which requires "large" corporations (under most metrics) so that they can be done by small, probably one man, corporations. This is desirable because the superior-subordinate relationships found in hierarchic organisations are inappropriate for creative work. The most important decisions in more creative work are about what to do not how to do it. Hierarchies are build on the presumption that people are told what to do (by their boss), even though they may exercise some degree of discretion in how to achieve it.

Elaborating the MIT Scenario

The MIT scenarios are extremes on the corporate size spectrum. Our special interest here is in the small end. I want to make two distinct elaborations of this. The first involves looking closer at the corporate size dimension, distinguishing a number of different metrics of corporate "size" and considering whether these distinct metrics are independent. The conjecture is that these different metrics are not closely coupled and are becoming more independent, allowing corporations which are small in some senses (e.g. number of employees, or capitalisation) to be large in other ways (e.g. in the size of task which they can accomplish, in the influence they exert, or in terms of revenue stream).

Other Correlated Dimensions

As well as breaking the corporate size dimension into independent strands, I would like to introduce some other dimensions which may be loosely related to corporate size in interesting ways. These are:
  1. Creativity
  2. Customer Relations
  3. Customer plurality

LabourerArtisanDesignerArtist
InstructNegotiateSelect
One customerFew customersMany customers


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