The end of management & what's next for the corporation | Hacker News Reader

The end of management & what's next for the corporation

cbennett.posterous.com

1 pointcbennett3 comments

An exploration of the history and future of the corporation, inspired by a Wall Street Journal article from last year called "The End of the Management"

Open articleView on HN

Well, the "end of the corporation" has been predicted (as a fad) many times post WWII, and I think it's an error to assume that the corporation will be substituted for some form of "wikinomics". Corporations will always be needed to mobilize capital for large projects (think: a steel mill or mining the moon, etc) and the author was right to point that out. Also, there will come a time when these "wikinomics-based" systems will be turned into platforms, much like Facebook is a platform, and platforms inevitably become big corporations too.

absolutely, it's almost unimaginable to imagine large-scale products (think a MacBook Pro of more dramatically a 747) being autonomously created via mass-collaboration. if you read the end of my post I agree whole-heartedly with that limitation. what I am really guessing is that in the 21st century hybrid organizational forms ought to embody different component of hierarchy (think vertical) and meshwork (think vertical) at different points or functions of output along the spectrum from creation to production in order to really adapt to the sea-changes in the economy. what exactly do you mean by 'platform' and why is it inevitable that these entities become large-scale corporations? depending on how you define it wikipedia is a 'platform' and yet it remains a 501(c)3 led by a visionary, jimmy wales, and yet crowd-sourced by the masses. you seem to have a static or monolithic image of what corporation means; a corporation, at least in the Coasian sense, is just a conglomeration of individual actors who decide to band together for awhile (we know all corporations die inevitably)

if you are interested in thinking the company from a 'long view', definitely check out this post: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/06/08/a-brief-history-of-the-... it was featured on HN a few months back and is definitely a wonderful (if expansive) introduction

Reply on news.ycombinator.com