Guru Corner
Disclaimer: Teachers highlighted in the guru
corner are not being recommended or promoted for spiritual guidance.
They are merely individuals who exemplify certain spiritual qualities
that are placed here for us to observe and use in whatever fashion
works best for us.
"In his youth Gerard Fairtlough, the author
of The Three Ways of Getting Things Done, thought, just
like everyone else, that hierarchy was a natural and necessary
part
of organizations. It took years of working for a large multinational
organization for him to begin to doubt that this was so, and
more years before he started to explore the alternatives to hierarchy.
(The Three Ways Of Getting Things Done Book Review, Retrieved
from Triarchy Press Publication located at http://www.triarchypress.co.uk/pages/book1.htm
on July 19, 2006).
This book discusses hierarchy, heterarchy and
responsible autonomy. It's Gerard's beliefs that we are going
to have to move from hierarchy to responsible autonomy in order
to evolve our organizational structures. The book covers examples
of each category and the advantages and disadvantages of each.
To order the book, go to the Amazon link below:
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Beyond The Dream
Imagine a world without bosses.
It's happening even as I type this sentence. Argentina already
has an established movement of workers who seized factories
closed down by employers and opened them under worker management.
There are no bosses. Each area of the factory has a commission
that makes joint decisions
and each commission has a coordinator. It is the coordinators
role to go from one group of specialization to another to gather
information and coordinate within group projects. So far, it's
working.
What kind of a world would we have
if when we woke up in the morning we weren't going to work for
our supervisor, but going to work for ourselves? Unlike self-employed
business owners, we aren't going to create a new hierarchy, we're
going to create a new cooperative vision of the world.
What would happen if we had no
more leaders fighting each other? What would happen if no single
person had the right to declare war despite the public's dissent?
What would a flat structure in all areas of our life produce?
Would it produce harmony, respect, and a new hope for the future?
Is this beyond the dream or is
this present day reality? You decide. Here is an excerpt from
an online article entitled Workers Without Bosses: Workers'
Self-Management in Argentina. It documents the struggle
of the Argentineans to create a movement
of workers
without bosses:
"The first of the occupied
factories, the cold-storage enterprise YaguanÈ, was
taken in 1996; then, in 1998, came IMPA, and then in the year
2000 90 metallurgist
workers from the Buenos Aires district of Avellaneda seized
the GIP metal company. They formed the Cooperative "UniÛn
y Fuerza" (Unity and Strength), and in January 2001, after
paying compensation, opened a factory in a place which over
the last years had seen more than 1,000 enterprises go bankrupt
[6].
That year, the tiles company from NeuquÈn, ZanÛn,
and the textile factory Brukman in Buenos Aires, were both
abandoned by their respective bosses and seized by the workers.
Brukman
was seized on December 18th, just one day before the "Argentinazo".
ZanÛn has increased productivity and created new working
posts (250 workers now run the factory). Jacobo Brukman, the
ex-owner of Brukman, expelled the workers on April 18th last
year, but in October 2003, the company was finally declared
bankrupt, expropriated and given back to the cooperative of
workers "18
de Diciembre", so the workers could start production once
again, while singing "Aqu" est·n, estas son,
las obreras sin patrÛn" (Here they are, these
are the workers with no boss)...
In the meantime, the owner had
destroyed the machinery, and the workers were camping for six
months outside the factory,
preventing the attempts of the boss to restart production with
scab labour [7]. Today, there are some 170 seized enterprises,
and 10,000 workers are taking part in that experience of collective
work. In all of them managerial hierarchies have disappeared
and the income is shared equally by all workers. In the past,
some companies spent 65-70% of their revenues on bosses' and
managers' wages (Workers Without Bosses, Retrieved
from http://struggle.ws/wsm/rbr/rbr8/argentina.html on
July 19,2006)
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