The corporation that can live on for 100s or 1000s of years

The corporation that can live on for 100s or 1000s of years

In a conversation on Facebook about Walkaway, one of my fave Doctorow novels, I’ve just read:

“It would be quite difficult to make corporations immortal. Corporations exist while the value they are designed to generate is needed.

If there’s not much more money to be made by giving that value (for various reasons), the money will go out of that corporation, and go somewhere else where it might turn a profit (or it’ll die and eat up the money you didn’t pull out earlier)”

The sentence “Corporations exist while the value they are designed to generate is needed” made me think. This is what it triggered:

If and when the employees run the corporation, then they will design it for the value that they can continually create with their collaboration for generating value from responding to emergent needs that their combined talents can serve. I don’t know about immortality but the corporation, in this model, can live on for 100s or 1000s of years

The association of free agents for that kind of corporation can certainly outlive its capitalist form. Of course, it still has to generate a surplus for re-investing into its expanded capacity to serve the blossoming of their workers’ talents. However, the ultimate purpose of the enterprise is not money but what I’ve previously called “liberating the social creativity of the labor force” in an unpublished essay.

There are signs pointing towards that possibility even inside the capitalist enterprise. Its viability still depends on whether they can meet the owners’ profit target, but central planning is replaced by a combination of self-management and wise use of internal market mechanisms.

I see it as a transitional form, in which the new is gestating inside the womb of the old. In such an enterprise, people are growing competences in discovering new ways of creating value, by responding to the evolving needs of their internal and external customers.

But why would we want to have a corporation mimic the longevity of the bristlecone pine trees? Well, those trees can achieve Methuselah’s age, or more, because they are highly resilient to harsh weather and poor soil conditions.

Longer life span has another evolutionary advantage, too. Imagine a baby born today, who can live up to 150–200 years by a conservative estimate of the cross-impact of the advances in medical sciences, biotechnologies, AI, and nanotechnologies, on the average length of human life.

Can the accumulated life experience lead to greater wisdom and greater benefit to the whole? It may but not necessarily. For that, we need a deliberately developmental orientation in organizations and people. Why not start it now?

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