Community

Doug Kirkpatrick, self-management extraordinaire, introduced me to Jose and the three of us, Adrian, Jose, and I, ended up meeting every week for about a year. An alternative system based on contributions, rather than money, started to take shape. Then I asked Jose for a name and he came up with ‘Radical’.

After a while we started writing (Radical Companies, Amazon.

Fiat & Radical

No violence, no punishing, no killing the bad guys, no revolution. Radical was simply an alternative to the invisible Fiat system we live in.

No Boss

There was the question of eliminating the boss. And we did.

Recognized Contributions

Co-author Adrian Perez and I experimented with how to recognize contributions. That was the one question that came up often at Nearsoft, a company I co-sounded. We ended up making all distributions equal.

Money

If we had distributed carrots or potatoes it may not be a problem. Just eat them or give them away to friends and family. Money, on the other hand, is a universal mean of exchange. For example, you can buy headphones with it.

For Radical we came up with RADs, without the baggage of money. You do something, other people recognize it as a contribution, and the results was a number of RADs.

Later we realized that recognized contribution was the key. If I have 10% of the RADs, I get 10% of the dividends and you 100 RADs and you have 200, you get twice what I do.

If I do not get what I think I deserve, I will have to talk to other co-owners to learn why.

In the spirint of Transparecy, so always make the amount of RADs transparent.

RADs!

We made the RADs mobile app, to do the calculations, free in Apple and Android stores.

Ownership & Co-Ownership

Fiat ownership is exclusive,

That is OK for a toothbrush, but not for a business whose growth comes from the work that many people put in it.

Radical co-ownersip spreads the wealth to the people who made it possible.

Fiat Ownership

More about Fiat ownership,

• We are blind to it
• We do not question it
• We even defend it
• We give sole credit to the owner(s) for the growth

We Are Blind to It

• Economists sometimes get really close to it, but they end up going around it.
• Marx and his followers blame everything on ruthless capitalists and other bad people.
• Others blame our problems on our veering away from the path of the indigenous people, y’know, the simple people who were no stranger to slavery.

It is incomprehensible that we do not see that, in the end, Fiat ownership causes the majority of the harm we face, starting with poverty and excessive wealth.

Co-Management

Co-management has gone by the name self-management, but a business has no self. We changed the name to co-management because people can make decisions, change their mindset, and work without a boss.

Please note that co-management is not a flat organization, a patriarchy, or a co-op. It moves us from "I" to "us."

Co-Ownership

Co-ownership is the kind of active property (e.g., a company) that belongs to all who contributes to it, and not just in money, like a co-op. If I recognize what you are doing as a contribution, then you are a co-owner.

in co-ownership,

• There are no bosses.
• Capital does not constitute a contribution.
• If the RADs given to you do not makes sense to you, you have the responsibility to have the people involved explain it to you. It may something for someting novel to your community, then they are responsable to explain it to you and peraps to y=the community.

Many questions came up with co-ownership and we worked out many of them, but we have blind spots, too. Others will bring up other points up later.

Capital & Contribution

Many people can make a contribution. Capital may come as a radical Investment from a bank, individuals, or even from a Venture Capital firm as a Radical Investment with a note attached to it,

• We will return the principal.
• Plus a fixed percentage, or a percentage of revenue, or any other scheme.
• A Radical Investment is never exchanged for power.
• If the investment does not work out and we can not do any of the things above, then that is that as far as the Radical Investment goes.

Future co-owmers are free to not be pat of the deal.

The RADs! Mobile App

The RADs! mobile app continues to evolve. We have added a lot of things, taken off other things, and resolved a whole lot of issues. For example, we tried to let co-owners give RADs directly, but that did not work so well. So we switched to recognizing contributions. The result is converted to tangible RADs.

No Dogma

There should be nothing dogmatic here. We simply visualize Radical as an alternative to Fiat.

You are welcome to add things and change things. Just be careful not to end up back into Fiat mode. If you do, there is no shame in course-correcting and do it better the next time.

Foundation

These are the blocks of the Foundation,