Mass Privitization in the New Economy

Win/Win Wealth Creation through
Win/Win Structures

WinWinWorld Network hinges upon the concept of Mass Privatization.  Put simply, this is the trend, already apparent, of organizing a venture in such a way that each participant “owns” their own work.  There are no employees, no managers, just customer/supplier relationships throughout the organization.

Unlike the standardization of bureaucracy, mass privatization, can be structured limitless ways. Mass Privatization is an organizing system that at its core is based upon personal ownership and individual liberty. Each individual owns the specific work that he or she performs and is interconnected and interdependent with other owning individual partners forming small teams. Self-organized small teams of owners, are interconnected with other teams, through the Internet and Information Superhighway, forming networks of teams or teamnets. The many interdependent virtual teamnets form business units and entire global organizations and communities.  Because the individual owns the specific work performed it is “private work” and because the masses of people in large global organizations are private workers the system is called “Mass Privatization.”

“I define Mass Privatization as a wealth-creation organization or community in which the individual workers, or a small team of workers, own the specific work they perform. These private owners work in partnership with other private owners. Networks of small virtual teams (teamnets) form chains of customers, linked by information technology to form powerful global enterprises (Lipnack, Stamps 1993). They are flexible enough to customize at the individual level while producing en masse, hence Mass Customization. Partners are bound together through a compelling vision and mission, as well as alignment that comes from an organizational structure based upon win/win compensation. Internal to the organization, suppliers as partners are compensated directly by their customers. Likewise, internal customers pay their suppliers directly. There are no managers, salaries, bosses, hierarchies, employees or central controls.” —Barry Carter, Infinite Wealth

“Is Mass Privatization socialism? No! In socialism the individual worker owns nothing. Is it capitalism? No! In capitalism the individual worker does not own the individual work performed. Though socialism purports to be a system in which workers own the means of production, and capitalism espouses the right of the individual to own a whole business, neither system supports the individual owning the means of production for his or her own work. Both systems are, however, based upon the central control and ownership of work.”  —Barry Carter from Infinite Wealth

The Broader Perspective of Mass Privatization

All of the above is a fairly narrow view of Mass Privatization as viewed from our Industrial Age paradigm.  As we transition to an Information Age where fragmentation and divisions do not exist between work, wealth creation, community, family, learning, social order, spiritually and more Mass Privatization is NOT viewed merely as a business system.  It is integrated into all of our daily activities each day.  For example Mass Privatization is not merely about money flow and material trade.  When two individuals (non-employees) email one another exchanging knowledge there is a private trade between the individuals.  In a chat line of 20 people in a small on-line community the private trade (or dialogue or synthesis of knowledge or synergy) becomes Mass Privatization.

Regardless of the medium of exchange; money, knowledge, wisdom, love or parallel sources of super-symbolic capital (electronic barter) when private individuals exchange or interact in a group this is Mass Privatization.  Today there are hundreds of Mass Privatization networks springing up all over the Internet trading mostly knowledge at this stage in the new civilization’s infancy.  This will expand to include exchange of wealth in all of its forms as the New Civilization matures.

The Historical Precedence and Current Trends

Alvin Toffler in his book The Third Wave break history into three periods: the Agricultural Age, the Industrial Age and the Information Age. He shows that the institutions for one era do not work for the next and that the old institutions are systematically replaced by the institutions of the incoming era. Barry Carter in his book Infinite Wealth takes it from here to show that Centralized Wealth Creation of the Industrial Age is presently being replaced with Decentralized Wealth Creation of the Information Age, just as Localized Wealth Creation of the Agricultural Age was replaced with Centralized Wealth Creation of the Industrial Age.

“With the Localized Wealth Creation of the Agricultural Age, most people worked, in bondage, as serfs or slaves. They worked on the land in hierarchical fiefdoms and kingdoms. The power used to created wealth was physical force or violence power. It was the primary fuel that propelled the entire civilization, as serfs and slaves were forced to work on the land. Serfs were compensated based upon a percent of the wealth produced. The only activity that was seen as creating wealth was direct agricultural production.

As we transitioned into the Centralized Wealth Creation of the Industrial Age, most people went from working as serfs to employees. They went from working in hierarchical-based fiefdoms on the land and in bondage to working in bureaucracy-based controlled economies contained within single buildings. They worked as representatives of the owners and were compensated for their time with standardized compensation ages and salaries. The power used to organize people shifted from brute-force to dollar wealth power. And our view of wealth-creation expanded from food production to include the making, mining and growing of things, with the making of things dominating wealth-creation.

As we are shifting to the Decentralized Wealth Creation of an Information Age, we are at the very beginnings of a shift from people working as employees in single buildings to people working as owning partners via the Information Superhighway. The shift is from people working in controlled economy-based bureaucracies to people working in free-market-based networks of self-directed virtual teams or team nets–Mass Privatization communities. People are shifting from working as representatives of the owners, receiving standardized compensation (pay for time), to owners that are compensated based on the value they add directly for customers. The power driving society is shifting from finite dollar power to infinite knowledge power. Our view of wealth-creation is expanding from the making, mining and growing of things to include knowledge-based wealth-creation.

Two hundred years ago Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations defining the Industrial Age wealth creation system. On page one Smith explains the division of labor, the core of bureaucracy and Industrial Age society. The division of labor broke work up into its most elemental fragments, with a Newtonian worldview, and aggregated the pieces back together through the control and management of ownerless people with dollar capital. As the Industrial Age is ending we still rest on this archaic 200-year-old rusty, now dysfunctional, foundation. Mass Privatization replaces the division of labor with the “synthesis of whole work” as the primary means to organize the work of the people and the wealth creation process. With the synthesis of whole work each owning individual operates a whole business seeing the entire business process–a quantum worldview. These whole businesses are synthesized together to form self-organizing teams and the teams synthesized to form team nets, business units and entire global communities and organizations.

An Example of Mass Privatization

The Abundance Bookstore in association with Amazon.com, is a tangible example of Mass Privatization. There are no managers or employees, salaries or wages, policy manual or rulebooks. Amazon.com is an established organization with thousands of NeuroNet like virtual on-line bookstores operating as partnering associates. These thousands of associates form an Amazon community. Each of these bookstores operates in individual niches–areas of special expertise. These partners are able to add value that simply could not be added by Amazon employees or any bookstore employees or through any bureaucracy. This is true whether the bookstore’s niche is Win/Win Wealth Creation, American Indian history, new age spirituality, model airplane building and flying, romance, conservative politics or a thousand other topics.

The topics above cannot be effectively be taught in schools or learned through experience in jobs and bureaucracies. These expertises are developed through individual’s passions and add tremendous value for customers when shared with them. When it comes to the concepts such as win/win wealth creation or Mass Privatization there simply is no pool of potential employees for Amazon to hire from, even if, Amazon executives knew of or understood the concept of Mass Privatization. When its comes to “knowledge work” of the Information Age employment and bureaucracy are not the best institutions to create wealth. Employment is based upon control. Control simply does not motive most people in the area of their passions. In an Information Age you must Do What You Love and the Money will Follow and this is the heart of Mass Privatization.

Without costing Amazon a penny in investment capital, Amazon has leveraged it position–reaching out to the free market for expertise that it cannot create through the control of bureaucracy. Amazon has won by increasing its sales, size, growth and profit. Amazon Associates have won by doing what they love while being compensated for it. They have also won by utilizing knowledge that they already have and leveraging on to what an established organization is doing, thus taking virtually no risk to start a business. And Amazon customers have won by getting the passionate expertise and recommendations of the Amazon Associates while receiving Amazon’s huge discounts.

Charlotte Shelton, in Quantum Leaps, says the following in regards to quantum physics and organizations: “At the subatomic level, the parts do not determine the behavior of the whole. Rather, the whole determines the behavior of the parts.” With Newtonian based analysis the parts determine the behavior of the whole (machines work this way). We try to make organizations work like machines through bureaucracy. With quantum based synthesis the whole determines the behavior of the parts. Organizations naturally work this way regardless of how we try to control them as machines.

We, therefore, cannot get individuals in bureaucracies to behave as we desire because the whole organizing structure of fragmentation, limited vision, limited motivation and limited ownership motivates their individual behaviors. Human organizing structures determine perspective and perception. Perspective and perception creates reality, and reality motivates behavior. Motivation, reality, alignment and organizations are all about perspective and this is what quantum physics is about. From what perspective is one experiencing a situation? In bureaucracy everyone’s perspective is always “intentionally” fragmented. In Mass Privatization everyone is always coming from a whole organization’s perspectives.

With bureaucracy we think by placing people in the right positions with the right titles and job descriptions and proper checks and balances (all of the pieces of the machinery defined) the whole bureaucracy will function properly. It never has and never will because the whole misaligned, fragmented system causes people to see different realities and behave in undesirable ways. The checks and balances work poorly because they are unnatural. Supervising people, auditing people, writing people up and firing them are unnatural acts. Managers routinely go for years without addressing performance and behavioral issues because managing people is so unnatural.

 

In the Information Age mass privatization will be the norm of human organization. Mass privatization is a system where individuals in teamnets (networks of teams) in private exchanges (not employees) of knowledge, wisdom, materials, capital and wealth, in all forms, are the economy. Companies today are well on their way to converting to mass privatization as they try one fad management program after another. Virtually all of these programs attempt to move bureaucracies from control to internal free market systems. Though they show where we must go they mostly fail because at the heart of bureaucracy is control. Infinite Wealth defines the new win/win wealth creation system as well as the win/win world that is being built upon it.  Infinite Wealth published by Butterworth-Heinnemann. To Contact Barry Carter email to:  barryc@icomnet.com

 

“Today we face the greatest move towards personal responsibility, ownership and personal power in all of human history. When we synthesize Age Wave Theory with the changes in work, business, science, information technology, organizations and wealth-creation we see a new work and wealth-creation institution emerging, he Mass Privatization enterprise or community.” Barry Carter–Infinite Wealth