NATURAL ENTERPRISE — THE ELEVATOR PITCH

What is Natural Enterprise?
A form of self-organized, self-managed, community-based business partnership in which two or more people agree to make a living together as collaborators and peers, to strive to attain what each member needs to achieve for his or her personal well-being, to accept substantial responsibility for each other, and to respect and help the community or communities in which the enterprise operates. It is ‘natural’ because this form of socio-economic activity occurs ubiquitously in hunter-gatherer cultures and in non-human animal cultures.

Why is it different?

What’s the catch?
Natural Enterprise could be to the modern economy what the Internet has become to modern politics and society — an anti-hierarchal mechanism that democratizes and liberates economic power and opportunity the same way the Internet has democratized and liberated social and political power and opportunity. Both innovations fundamentally threaten established power, authority, ‘wisdom’ and control, by undermining them and rendering their hierarchies vulnerable and potentially obsolete. Large corporate oligopolies will recognize Natural Enterprises as threats to their power and profitability, and, much as they have responded to labour unions, will attempt to ignore, circumvent, weaken or crush them. For at least a generation, pionering Natural Enterprises, much like the fledgling Internet of the 1980s, will have to be content to play a minor role. Charles Handy envisions this as being like the relationship of the flea to the elephant — Natural Enterprise will contract mainly with large corporations as suppliers, and will be to some extent dependent on these large corporations’ largesse and their increased proclivity for outsourcing, along with the Natural Enterprises’ own innovativeness and agility. As Handy says, such uneven contracts will at least be an improvement on the wage-slave employer-employee contracts they supersede. And eventually Natural Enterprises will become so numerous, and specialized and adept in so many industries and aspects of business, that they will start networking and contracting and associating with each other, using the power of the Internet. And much as specialty stores undermined and largely replaced the large, cumbersome, general-purpose department store, Natural Enterprises could ultimately eliminate the need for and replace large, cumbersome corporations. Just as the Internet created a socio-political and information ‘World of Ends’, where central control and authority are not needed and all value is created at the ‘ends’, so, too could Natural Enterprise create an economic ‘World of Ends’ where corporatism, oligopoly and massive size are not needed in economic entities and where all value is created at the ‘ends’ — face to face with customers. It’s a revolutionary and powerful and liberating idea, but it will take time, patience and energy to bring it about.

How do I set one up?
The Handbook is now being written. The framework is illustrated above. You can learn more about them here.

* What’s In a Name? I have used the terms New Collaborative Enterprise, Existential Enterprise (Charles Handy’s term), and New Tribal Ventures (Daniel Quinn’s term) to describe such enterprises. The ‘new’ in these terms suggests there are ‘old’ collaborative enterprises, the term ‘existential’ has been voted off the island by readers of this blog as too highfalutin’ and intimidating a term, and terms like ‘tribal’ conjure up images of war paint and noble savages. Autopoietic Enterprise (it means self-creating and self-managing) is accurate but unpronounceable and would probably be perceived as pretentious. Readers have suggested the terms ‘Natural Enterprise’ (Harold Jarche) and ‘Organic Enterprise’ (Don Dwiggins), which I like because they’re simple and descriptive. I like Natural better because its opposite (unnatural) is exactly what the modern corporation is, while the term ‘organic’ is a bit ambiguous (it means ‘related to organs’, ‘related to organisms’, ‘carbon-based’,  and ‘instrumental’, of which only the second definition is a propos). I’ almost decided to keep ‘Collaborative’ in the term for two reasons: To stress that these enterprises entail more than one person working together (a sole proprietor, to me, does not an enterprise make, even if s/he is a powerful networker — enterprises are about people making a living together), and because it would allow me to continue using the acronym NCE, which has gained some common parlance over the past year. But in the end, simpler is better, Natural Enterprise is inherently collaborative, and I was taught ‘when in doubt, leave it out’. So Natural Enterprise it is — thanks to Harold for the inspiration.