Next Generation Enterprise Design
Steward-owned shares in the linked post a case study from Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL) showing "26 regenerative and distributive approaches enabled by innovations in the 'deep design' of the business", concluding their post with this Call to Action:
We need many more next-generation enterprise designs that enable strategies and approaches essential for guiding humanity into the Doughnut.
Yes!
This-generation enterprise design is dominated - dare we say monopolized? - by the corporation as a legal form of ownership and the hierarchical management bureaucracy for the standardization of production and distribution at scale.
Next-generation enterprise design can begin by going back to the basics, to frame enterprise as a social configuration of physical Knowledge + Networks + Routines for paying cost-for-value to exchange value-for-price by putting technology into action offering an abundance of choices from which others can choose by paying the price.
This new view of enterprise shows us a new view of the economy as a mutual aid society for sharing an abundance of technology solutions to the everyday problems of everyday people living our own best lives, as best we can under the circumstances then prevailing, every day, through self-organizing and adaptively evolving networks of enterprise and exchange, using money as a legal instrument for effecting transactions between people separated by distances of time, place and social connection, to construct, and episodically deconstruct to reconstruct, a safe and dignified house for humanity within built environments of Urban, Rural, Curated and Left-Alone landscapes along the creative edge of a constantly changing and adaptively evolving Human partnership with Nature, choosing new beginnings from time to time, to fit the changing times, through inquiry for insight and new learning that can inform innovation, making new choices more popular as better fit to the circumstances then prevailing, while letting previously popular choices fade into history as a good fit to circumstances prevailing at an earlier time, driving the flourish and fade of the social contract between enterprise and popular choice from innovation through platform building, field building, application, integration and standardization to eventual and inevitable obsolescence, that is the true measure of human prosperity, and the real story of our human history.
This design paradigm shows us the every enterprise needs money to pay its cost-for-value before it can exchange its value-for-price.
When Enterprise needs money, Finance provides it.
This shows us that we cannot design Enterprise without including in that design strategies for financing that enterprise.
When we look at Finance, we see multiple institutions of agency, authority and accountability for aggregating money set aside by others as savings for investment in financing for enterprise, and allocating those aggregations as money made to flow into enterprises for their use in doing their work of paying cost-for-value to exchange value-for-price, for a time, at a cost and on terms that informs the way business does its business of expressing technology in abundance for sharing with others in exchange for a price paid in money or other value as choices from which others can choose in constructing our own personal and private worlds in which we live our own best lives as best we can under the circumstances then prevailing, personally and privately, out of the world we construct for ourselves in which to live, together, publicly and socially, through our technologies, out of the world of Nature into which we each and all are born, to inform the economy that informs society that informs the future as our new frontier.
Each of these different institutions of finance aggregates and allocates money according to its own unique institutional language and logic for choosing which enterprises to flow money into, and on what terms that money will be made to flow.
These different institutions of Finance include:
Each of these different institutions has its own unique, institutional language and logic for deciding where the money it controls will be made to go, as financing for enterprise, and on what terms.
Each, as it turns out, is uniquely well suited to flowing money into enterprise at different points on its journey through the flourish and fade of its social contract with popular choice, from innovation to obsolescence.
This generation enterprise design centers on Growth in the Public Markets (Exchange-traded securities), that is anticipated by Venture Capital and hospiced by Private Equity.
The above gives us a new framework of next generation enterprise design that centers on Sufficiency that is achieved by sequencing the capital stack, adding patronage, grants and subsidies to build property that can be monetized, all of which gets refinanced through securitization until standardization, at which point securitization gets refinance by financially engineering Equity Paybacks of Fiduciary Money to an actuarial/fiduciary cost of money, plus opportunistic upside (for Actuarial Compliance as to INCOME), from enterprise cash flows prioritized by contract for suitability, longevity and fairness (for Fiduciary Fairness as to IMPACT).
By replacing the Growth Imperative with the Enterprise Journey, this sequencing-the-capital-stack design paradigm supports authenticity and integrity in enterprise, and social cohesion in the economy.