I recently recorded a podcast with my friend and colleague Paul Rosenberg.
Paul has been a guest speaker at a couple of Obris events over the past few years. He’s always well-received, and if you are familiar with his work you know why.
Just the other day Paul wrote an article entitled “United We Fall.” The simple premise is that individuals with freedom and autonomy are a far more positive and productive force than a unified group of people.
The reasons for this are many, including:
• Following leaders displaces our individual judgement;
• Following leaders displaces motivation;
• Quoting the words of a leader displaces self-responsibility.
These are pretty important qualities. We all want to have sound judgment, the right motivations and to take responsibility for our actions…at least most of us do.
Why would we want to give up our power to control those qualities to an organization or a leader?
It was Star Trek’s Spock (Leonard Nimoy) that famously said, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or one.” Hogwash I say.
I’m not going to get all Ayn Rand on you, don’t worry. However I do want to point out that most of the good in the world has come from individuals acting (mostly) on their own. Most of the evil in the world has come from groups of people acting cohesively. Think about it (and read Paul’s article for proof).
Exponential Organisations Versus Unity
Paul’s article got me thinking about the parallels between groups of people, and large organizations. They are really one in the same. A large organization is just a bunch of people in defined roles…jobs.
A few weeks back I did a podcast with Kent Langley, a faculty member at Singularity University and the head of the global ExO movement.
During our chat we learned that Exponential Organisations are an evolution of the old corporate structure where control of the organization rested in layers of management that supervised teams.
Exponential Organizations function in a much different way, relying more on individual creativity and small teams, assisted by technology, to quickly tackle complex problems.
This is being driven by automation, which will eliminate most of the mundane and repetitive tasks so that human workers can focus on the bigger, more creative problems. The type of problems that individuals excel at solving.
I don’t want to get off on a tangent, which I easily could. So, please take a listen to my conversation with Paul Rosenberg and see if you come to the same conclusions I have.
– Mark
“The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can’t be any large-scale revolution until there’s a personal revolution, on an individual level. It’s got to happen inside first.” – Jim Morrison