blog de notas de juan freire

[El informe McKinsey on Co-operatives cuestiona las limitaciones para el crecimiento e innovación que tradicionalmente se achacan al modelo cooperativista y plantea los puntos débiles que deben afrontar para resultar competitivas a la vez que generan un modelo más sostenible social y económicamente en el largo plazo]

… McKinsey & Company released its much-heralded report McKinsey on Co-operatives on Tuesday last week (9 October) at the international cooperative summit in Quebec where their global managing director Dominic Barton arrived to deliver the findings. “The time has come for the [cooperative] model to be put forward and celebrated,” he told his audience. He called for a shift generally in business from “shareholder value to stakeholder value” and strongly criticised the short-termism of conventional business, driven by the need to produce three-monthly financial accounts for investors. “Quarterly capitalism does not lead to good results. The short term pressure is toxic”

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… study begins by challenging the widely held view that co-operatives grow more slowly than their plc competitors. The data published by the firm suggests that co-ops’ growth rates are comparable to those in other forms of business, although McKinsey says that the way growth is achieved is different, being primarily focused on their members’ current needs than on developing new markets: “Based on our analysis, we see two primary growth opportunities for co-operatives.

First, co-ops should play to their natural strengths and continue to pursue market-share gains by delivering a unique member and customer experience. The other big growth opportunity for co-ops, and probably the one with the most potential, is to more actively pursue opportunities in fast-growing adjacent markets,” the report claims.

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… coops achieve success in employee mobilisation behind a ‘sense of higher purpose’, and it produces a set of data from north American co-operative banks which show higher levels of customer satisfaction compared with conventional banks … co-operatives in general suffer when it comes to ‘organisational agility’ – or in other words that they move more slowly when it comes to addressing problems or taking up new opportunities: “Part of this is attributable to less effective performance-management systems and part is – according to our interviews – due to the naturally slower pace of democratic decision-making processes” 

… empezar a construir una ontología de las ‘Empresas del Procomún’, la futura arquitectura conceptual de esta web. Por otro lado, discutir y empezar a elaborar los fundamentos de la commonstitución, el conjunto de normas y compromisos de quienes quieran conformar el cuerpo investigador del proyecto…

Cuihua Shen and Peter Monge (2011). Who connects with whom? A social network analysis of an online open source software community. First Monday, Volume 16, Number 6

ABSTRACT: By examining “who connects with whom” in an online community using social network analysis, this study tests the social drivers that shape the collaboration dynamics among a group of participants from SourceForge, the largest open source community on the Web. The formation of the online social network was explored by testing two distinct network attachment logics: strategic selection and homophily. Both logics received some support. Taken together, the results are suggestive of a “performance–based clustering” phenomenon within the OSS online community in which most collaborations involve accomplished developers, and novice developers tend to partner with less accomplished and less experienced peers.

o hace falta tener grandes estructuras organizacionales, sino más bien patrones de organización. Como señala el título, más falta hace organizarse que una organización. Fundamentalmente por algo muy singular del mundo actual: es necesario compartir.

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Para maximizar el potencial creativo y la capacidad de aprendizaje, es crucial que los directivos y ejecutivos comprendan la interrelación entre las estructuras formales y las redes informales autogenerativas. Las primeras son un conjunto de normas que definen las relaciones entre personas y tareas y determinan la distribución de poder. Los límites son establecidos por acuerdos contractuales que delinean subsistemas (departamentos) y funciones. Las estructuras formales están en documentos oficiales de la organización (diagramas organizativos, reglamentos, estrategias y procedimientos). Las informales son redes de comunicaciones fluidas y fluctuantes. La noción de red es la propiedad emergente de las nuevas organizaciones. La capacidad de estructurarse en forma de red y en relación con el entorno está constituyéndose en la clave. La fuerza de una organización -su flexibilidad, su potencial creativo, y su capacidad de aprendizaje- reside en la capacidad de generar redes en su interior y con su entorno. Juan Freire habla de la organización interfaz, que se acopla y desacopla con rapidez y ductilidad en torno a proyectos y objetivos …

… The new institutional reality could be described as follows:

THE FIRST LAYER: COLLABORATIVE PLATFORMS

- At the core are the enabling collaborative socio-technological platforms, that allow knowledge workers, software developers and open design communities to collaborate on joint projects, outside of the direct control of corporate entities.

THE SECOND LAYER: OPEN DESIGN COMMONS

(vía P2P Foundation blog)

This leads to the second reason we believe that large-scale corporations will remain a prominent feature of our professional landscape: because they will be best positioned to develop and support scalable, long-term, trust-based relationships. Think about it. Even the most accomplished networker supported by social networks like Facebook can develop only a limited number of trust-based relationships. On the other hand, a large institution could scale these kinds of relationships far more rapidly and broadly than any individual could.

Imagine if a well-respected, global firm decided to create the right platform to foster these kinds of relationships, not only among its own employees, but across a worldwide network of diverse external partners. Not only could such a large institution get bigger but—because of the collaboration curve—it would generate increasing returns to scale, accelerating growth for both individuals and the firm. How could any one person, on their own, replicate the scale of relationships such an institution would offer?

Long-term trust based relationships matter because, in the Big Shift era, tacit knowledge is what allows all of us, individually and collectively, to keep up with a fast-moving, unpredictable world. Tacit knowledge, which we all have but experience great difficulty in expressing, is typically created and exchanged only in long-term, trust-based relationships. To access valuable tacit knowledge, in other words, we need scalable networks of relationships, supported by shared practices. Since people can’t ever access as many relationships on their own as they could as part of a larger institution, they will face significant disadvantages by remaining independent.

Now, of course, this assumes a dramatic transformation in the institutions that we have today, from institutions that flourish by suppressing individuality to ones where individuality must flourish in order for the institution to do the same. This will not happen overnight. But companies will eventually awake to the opportunity—indeed the imperative—this transition represents. Long-term competitive pressures ensure that the old guard institutions will wither and eventually die if they don’t.

From this perspective, we believe the current flight of passionate and talented people from institutional confines represents a transitional event rather than a permanent shift to a “free agent nation” or “e-lance economy.” People are fleeing today because our current generation of institutions undermines talent development in the name of efficiency. As a new generation of institutions emerges the current flight from institutions will reverse.