Imagining New Possibilities

We are, of course, not the first to point out the importance of using broader, non financial, criteria in evaluating businesses and other organizations. For example, there has been significant recent interest in Europe (especially in Britain) in the concept of "stakeholder capitalism", which explicitly takes into account the interests of the stakeholders listed above. In the U.S., there has also been recent interest in defining broader measures of economic well-being than simple Gross Domestic Product (GDP).^[5]

Much of this previous work, however, has focused on what governments can do about the problems. While we believe that governments and laws will inevitably play an important role in solving (or exacerbating) these problems, we think it is also vital to consider what other people and organizations can do. We are particularly interested in what businesses and other organizations can do without explicit government intervention.

We also believe it is important to be both as reality-based and as creative as possible in imagining new kinds of organizations to better satisfy our real goals. To illustrate the kinds of thinking we believe are needed, we briefly describe in this section three examples of new organizational possibilities that have emerged in our work in the MIT Initiative on Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century.

"Guilds" for Independent Contractors

If, as many observers believe, more and more people effectively become independent contractors in fluid project-based "virtual" organizations, where will they go to satisfy many of the human needs that are satisfied today by large organizations? Where will they go, for instance, for a sense of financial security, identity, companionship, and learning? We have developed a detailed scenario for one possible answer to this question:^[6] They may join independent organizations that do not produce specific products but, instead, provide a stable "home" for their members. We call these organizations "guilds", evoking the crafts associations of the Middle Ages, and we assume that they could provide various forms of health and unemployment insurance, social networking, educational opportunities, and other services. We believe that there are a number of organizations today from which such guilds could grow: professional societies, unions, college alumni associations, temporary help agencies, religions, or neighborhoods.

Public Measures of Social Value Created by Companies

What if there were widely available measures of the value of "good" jobs a company created? Some organizations are already using surveys to rate companies in terms of how good they are as places to work. More elaborate financial measures could be created, for example, by comparing the income and benefits workers received in their current jobs to the income and other benefits they would receive in their next best alternative jobs.^[7] How would such measures affect the behavior of workers and companies?

Some steps in this direction are being taken by companies, like Interface and Nike in the U.S. and Shell in Europe, that are exploring seriously what it would take to manage by a "triple bottom line" of economic, social, and environmental impact.

Integrating Work and Family Concerns, Not Balancing Them

We often assume that the needs of work and family are in conflict and that we must trade off one against the other. In a recent study at Xerox, however, an innovative project tried to help employees integrate their work lives and family lives, instead of designing work processes first and then trying to balance family needs afterwards. This approach led an engineering team, not only to have more time with their families, but also to complete their project sooner and with higher quality than comparable projects in their organization.^[8]

^[5]For example, see the following Web site for information about the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), http://www.rprogress.org

^[6]See the following papers: Malone and Laubacher 1998 (excerpts comprise chapter 6 of this volume; full text available at http://www.ccs.mit.edu/21c/21CWP001.html); Laubacher, Malone, and the MIT Scenario Working Group 1997 (available at http://ccs.mit.edu/21c/21CWP004.html).

^[7]This idea was suggested by Don Lessard.

^[8]Bailyn, Fletcher, and Kolb 1997.