I founded a company that grew from 1 person 26 years ago to 850 people and is now 270. I think about the topics in the book quite a bit. And a while back I reached the same conclusion that companies need a different governance structure to not succumb to financial gravity.
I feel your book overlaps with Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux. His book explores how organizations can move beyond traditional command-and-control management toward self-managed, purpose-driven, and more human-centered ways of operating. It gives a number of examples of companies operating in this way. But it does not focus on governance structure. In fact, one of the companies died because of a change of ownership.
Your book also provides many examples of which I was not aware. It is always inspirational to hear of other companies trying to do things differently, even if it is not directly applicable to your business.
I like your use of gravity as a metaphor and particularly that you can harness it to your advantage. I also believe strongly that we should not accept the way things are and we can change them.
You mention in the book that companies in the s&p 500 live about 18 years, when in the past they would live 60 years and one of the reasons for this is financial gravity and in particular the change that happened in the 1980s where companies started solely serving investor interests. In thinking about companies, I use the metaphor of waves and surfing. I feel 100 years ago the waves were very infrequent. What has happened in the last several decades is that the time between waves has shortened. Companies have had to deal with changes like the internet, smart phones and social media, and now AI.
Alvin Toffler in Future Shock (written in 1984) argues that the accelerating pace of technological, social, and economic change can overwhelm people's ability to adapt. Toffler calls this condition "future shock"—a state of stress, confusion, and disorientation caused by too much change in too little time. He predicted exactly what we are experiencing now. I think companies are also going through this kind of shock and likely the average life span of companies will continue decreasing.
Going back to the waves and surfing. A company is a bunch of people on a surf board and the waves are coming faster and faster. Waves can be opportunities or they could kill the company. And so we need to think about how to structure a company so that it is agile and can catch waves or get out of the way of waves. I feel companies need to be much more fluildly structured so they can adapt to fast moving changes in the environment. Most companies are structured too rigidly.
Another metaphor for thinking about companies is as a multicellular organisms, where individual cells are people. As with multicellular organisms, companies will need to evolve into more advanced organizations. The way this happens with organisms is through death and mutation and can take millions of years. The same thing happens with companies, they die, and people leave to join or start another company, taking some of the lessons with them. This rate of evolution is very slow, so we need to think about how we can change the dna of an existing company. I feel structure and environment within the company can play a role here.
Also, I feel gravity applies to individual self-interest of which financial is a subset. With any organizational group, you are trying to take individuals with their own self-interest and are trying to align them to achieve something that is greater. If you can pull it off, each individual can realize much more of their potential and the group can achieve far more. But the force of self-interest is always pulling to break things apart, and for this you need to put in structures that maintain integrity.
Again, thanks for writing the book. I enjoyed it.