After writing Culture Shock I went on a bit into a bit of a sofa-slouching-brain-resting phase: bought a PS3, developed a bad habit around Battlefield 3, and stopped reading business books.

I’m sort of still half in that phase. Still can’t get my head back into business books, for example.

Good things came of this slovenly phase. I learned a lot from getting back into video games and ended up writing this piece for Wired UK: ‘Modern business is a video game: a bad one’.

I’ve also been bingeing on the Game of Thrones books. Basically ‘fantasy’ Lord of the Rings-esque series, describing the rise and fall of elite families and their characters in a mythical world. Brilliant, easy reading for a geek like me.

(Sorry for the long intro here – I’m winding up to something interesting, I think…)

All of which is a long way of saying that I’ve been spending an hour or so a night in bed immersed in stories of a feudal world, with the hierarchies of old – from Kings and Queens down to filthy poor peasants and slaves.

At the same time, consolidation in the social media and social business sectors has continued. Many of our peers have now sold their businesses to bigger companies, all part of that natural ecosystem of business, where the entrepreneurs reach the end of their natural phase, want to move on to the next thing, and where incumbents want to buy in some of the sizzly new stuff. That’s all good: I’ve been really happy seeing people I like achieve their goals and more and more I can see the sense in this cycle.

In my head these two things have begun to relate: the fortunes of the Lords and Ladies of a fictional world and the accomplishments of entrepreneurs in my world.

And for some reason I’ve started to get this idea that most people are modern slaves, at work. Or at least, disempowered and mistreated peasants. (I know many people aren’t, but this is a dramatisation, mkay!?).

If we pretend that most people are ‘modern slaves’ at work, toiling away to produce the lion’s share of rewards for a small royal elite (shareholders and senior management), when it is in fact their work that creates the rewards, then I can’t stop thinking about employee ownership as the only way forward.

In fact, I’ll go further: I believe that within 15 years, all businesses will have a significant proportion of employee ownership (let’s say more than 25%). That’s probably wrong – if it were to happen, would probably be the greatest shift of wealth ever in the history of the world or something. But it’s just what I feel intuitively – no science included.

Entrepreneurs deserve a premium for taking risk and the act of creation and early growth. I feel that strongly, personally. And shareholders deserve a reward for their risk and investment. But it feels too much, too far skewed at the moment, to me.

I am conscious that this creates a dangerous expectation for me as an entrepreneur. Personally, despite what I’m saying I would like to do a traditional ‘exit’ at some point. I think it would be interesting, exciting, and a nice lump sum would be useful too. As for NixonMcInnes (where I don’t think that’s likely), I personally think that increasing the employee ownership from 5 of us (25%) to 90%-100% would be a brilliant outcome. So what I am saying isn’t free from hypocrisy, expectation-setting or whatever: I’m talking the talk – it remains to be seen if I (and others) can walk it.

But yes. There it is. When the millions go to the few founders and executives, and the rest of the organisation usually resembles a pyramid, with most people earning not very much at all, have we really come very far in the past thousand years? Outliers like John Lewis and other-brilliant-companies-owned-by-their-staff are just that – outliers, quirks. Isn’t that a bit weird?

Aren’t most people just modern slaves, when they are toiling for others?

And won’t that necessarily change as things are becoming more transparent, people are better connected, work tools are lower cost and more accessible, and more of us in the UK work in knowledge work where the product is the people?

I think so. That’s why this topic is in my book, and why we have Margaret Elliott speaking at Meaning 2012 about her experiences creating and scaling up successful employee-owned businesses here in the UK.

But now I believe in this even more – more than when I wrote Culture Shock, more than when I curated the original speakers for Meaning. Ownership belongs here, where it happens, not somewhere else – best of all, in the hands of the people doing it. In time, this will be irresistable.

What do you think?

A while ago I went to hear Jon Ronson talk about his new book on The Pyschopath Test. As you’d expect if you know Ronson, the talk was both droll and fascinating. But there was that thing, again, about how many leaders may be psychopathic.

Then, in this last week or so, with more outrageous behaviour at banks here in the UK and the attitude of some of their leaders it led to a discussion – probably with Jenni – about what to do with psychopaths. And, in this pop science pub conversation, we were considering non-murdering psychopaths – those that get on and progress especially in business due to their personalities and traits, (though I admit I have no idea what I’m talking about) but don’t kill people (directly).

The question is, as society evolves is there a role for psychopathic people in life and business? What can they offer to the common good? How can they contribute? It would be easy to assume that we want a world only populated with compassionate, empathic, considerate people – that does sound quite nice, actually. But is it true?

Or to put it in the words of software developers, are psychopaths a feature or a bug in society? They seem only to be discussed as a bug, an issue that needs to be fixed.

In this pub conversation we agreed that it is easy to bemoan people who appear to have no regard for others, and the kind of audacious, utterly cold and ruthless decisions that these kind of CEOs and political leaders make. But is it possible that we need them more than we realise? I’m willing to entertain that idea.

And in the future, from the perspective of inclusion and also from using the resources we have to get the best outcomes for as many people as possible, why would we segregate people with these traits and condition any more than anyone else?

If we were designing a better world, wouldn’t an enlightened future world actually place these people in roles that suited their unique talents and abilities, and provide counterbalances and stopping mechanisms to optimise their positive contributions, whilst limiting the awful consequences of unhindered decision-making?

There’s this huge momentum towards fluidity at work – to remote working, to portfolio careers, job sharing, the rise of ronin / freelancing, work life balance, Skype, yammer and the Cloud and so on.

For us as individuals, as workers, there’s lots to like in all of this. We are unleashed! I can work from anywhere! When I want, how I want, with who I want (and so the dreamy hype goes).
And there are – of course – tons of benefits for organisations and businesses too who have been keen to capitalise on these.

But in this working world, if we are all remote and virtual and part of loosely formed networks around projects that quickly form and then dissolve, then where is home?
Where is the centre of gravity that binds and anchors and provides that sense of HQ, of the mothership?

We know what we gain with fluidity, but what do we lose when this base goes, both as workers and business owners?

This all occurred to me after a week where I spoke with two different Managing Directors of consulting firms, both much more fluid than NixonMcInnes.

One firm was entirely geographically distributed across the States, with 20 people peppered across the whole country. Their consultants were mid- to late-career, so pretty grown up, experienced business people and the consultancy operated a reasonably traditional ‘eat what you kill’ mode of rewards. No central staff, no support or admin people not earning fees, no geographical centre of operations. Certainly makes sense from a financial bottom-line point of view.

But not everything about the consultancy was traditional – like us they do some more radical stuff in how they work together. Their MD told me that they tried to get everyone together three times a year. THREE TIMES, I thought, as I thought of how frustrated I get when we struggle to get a decent turn out for weekly team meetings, given all of the important, useful stuff there is to relay and the constant challenge to satisfy people’s desire to know what’s going on.

The other MD runs a consulting firm also in Europe that does have a centre of gravity, an office with a small central staff and then consultants distributed in different countries, all working from wherever they want to work from. But we were talking about how that might not always be a good idea commercially.

The third thing rattling round in the same tumble-dryer of background thinking was the 37 Signals case study of distributed team, connected by digital tools, and their Meetings are Toxic mantra. They are world class in what they do, they seem to do ok without lots of face to face meetings – theoretically one of the key benefits of a central HQ.

And these conversations and thoughts made me think about what we’ve been doing with NixonMcInnes.

We’ve been deliberately developing a real physical heart, and so have invested our office space, in having administrative and marketing support, and in developing a cohort of people living and working in the same county, and almost entirely in the same city.

It’s like we are walking directly against the tide. And that’s confusing (although not unusual for us).

I wonder what organisational benefits we derive by having a home. Or are we just doing it because of the preferences of the people in the organisation, and if so what does that cost us and do we acknowledge that?

Also, do we gain competitive advantage? If we compete with a distributed firm, are we more likely to win or is the playing field level apart from the extra financial resources they have saved from central costs?

In theory, I would expect benefits to show up in areas like these:
– in trust, resilience and therefore quality under pressure in the relationships between team members leading to client retention, referrals and project profitability
– in people’s happiness and engagement at work (even as I write this one, I’m starting to question it) leading to talent acquisition and retention
– in communication between team members which then drives quality to clients and profits for the company through saved time (again, I can quickly think of counter arguments…)
– in pitching for clients business, and them having the comfort of the physical tangible sense of a team and a business (having seen the networked agency model many times I am actually more confident of this point for the time being though I think it will change over time)

Are there others?
Are these flawed, am I drinking my own Kool-aid?

The thing is, I know I want to be part of something and to me personally I like the physical part of that, the offline, the home. And I believe others do too.

But there is a tidal force here. And a string of benefits as well as costs that we are only beginning to understand.

Given all of this, I do wonder with some interest how the traditional physical centre of gravity at the heart of an organisation will change in this next generation of work.