We Need Innovation in Corporate Structure

This morning I came across an article called Michigan Workers Must Build a New Mind-set. I could not agree more. In fact we all need to build a new mind-set to meet the new economy that just pulled into the train station. An icon of the way things are "supposed" to be, is now bankrupt. General Motors was more than a company. It was a belief system. People believed they could get a public education, join a big corporation, maybe move up the ladder a little bit, and retire comfortably. To quote: "It's hard to say that the folks hurt most by GM's decline -- the thousands who have lost their jobs and the thousands more who will -- did anything wrong. They bought into a system that rewarded work with "golden handcuffs.'" Jim Collins, of Good to Great fame, had this to say in a recent article in Inc Magazine. "What's the first thing you learn about investing? Never put all your eggs in one basket. [When you join a big firm] You've just put all your eggs in one basket that is held by somebody else. As an entrepreneur, you know what the risks are. You see them. You understand them. You manage them. If you join someone else's company, you may not know those risks, and not because they don't exist. You just can't see them, and so you can't manage them. That's a much more exposed position." We are moving uphill, trying to close the gap between our expectations of what the World will offer us, and the reality of the changes we are facing. Innovation in corporate structuring can help us get over this hump and into the future of work life. Look at what the the "copy left" movement has done for software with the General Public License and creative materials with the Creative Commons. The move is already being made by companies like Mozilla and SRC Holdings, but we can go even further. With the Fireworks Project we are committed to a member managed organizational structure, and we're doing this with the help of a new statute in the US state of Vermont called a 'virtual company'. It is a piece of legislation that is just the beginning of the changes that we need to see in corporate structuring while putting General Motors behind us.