A business experiment In my previous article, i neglected to point out 'the whole reason' for converting to cooperative structures (other

than esthetics, morality, and sustainability): workers' motivation. Yesterday, i visited the local supermarket.. The manager was helping bag groceries.. A superficial examination of his motivations might include the hypothesis: what a caring guy! But.. i suspect it's more dark and depressing: he's likely in fear of losing his job. Who isn't these days? i used to work for a major telecommunications company.. A huge corporation.. i recently revisited work friends when i picked up my hangglider nearby.. All they could talk about was employee cuts. They joked: Pretty soon, there'll be nothing but management and a bunch of robots. My interests in AI/machine-consciousness aside, this idea is a huge mistake. Telecommunications maintenance is not especially amenable to robotic automation. It would be an interesting challenge but not worth the investment. i'd rather invest in education and the human factor rather than applying robotic technology to telecom maintenance. Again, most people are afraid of losing their job these days.. This is the worst of all possible motivating factors we could consider. No one is exempt from the axe. It's okay when we consider: productivity, quality, and efficiency but.. The problem with having 'the axe' continually loom over our necks is: to live in constant fear is Demoralizing. There's nothing more unproductive than a demoralized workforce. So on the surface, a 'tip top' super-efficient work-force constantly in fear of losing their jobs looks 'wonderful' (to investors). But the work-atmosphere is patently Hell, worker-management relations are at an all-time low (just take a peek at union websites), product/services are marginal at best,.. Essentially all due to the focus: return to investors. Greed. Let's turn this around in our imagination: let's focus on worker profit sharing. Instead of continually living in fear of losing jobs, workers are focused on quality product/service to customer. Why? Because now they have a vested interest! A more satisfied customer means more profits in their pockets! :) There's a direct connection between customer satisfaction and pay! :) What better motivating factor could we have! :) i propose we perform a business experiment: take two 'identical' medium-sized companies performing 'exactly the same operations'. (Identical and same operations as close as we can choose.) Run one company the traditional way: all profits go to investors, a rigid authoritarian management structure, cogs in a wheel,.. The other company: profit sharing weighted for high performers, a cooperative management structure, everyone focused on customer satisfaction,.. i guarantee you you won't need a year to observe who's more successful having a larger share of customer market. i guarantee you. The 'final' consideration is innovation. In a cooperative, it's absolutely critical we never lose focus on innovation: better ways of doing things, things that might produce orders-of-magnitude shifts in customer satisfaction, more sustainable structures/products/services,.. ^^ The primary danger of a cooperative structure is ironically the motivating factor for establishing them: greed. Greed can destroy morale just as easily as fear of losing jobs. Greed inspires envy, envy inspires covet, and covet inspires evil. So it's critically important we keep the spirit of cooperation alive in cooperatives. As we must cultivate a culture of innovation.