Strategy.manage.ent

Thinking more about P2P companies. There's a guy crawling over my house with a power saw. I heard a lot of thumping and banging outside, went to see what was going on and there he was -- with his beat-up pickup truck, scruffy toboggan hat, and a Get Phunky t-shirt. Definitely not your corporate type.

He's a contractor -- here to do a little repair to my window frames and soffet boards before the painter comes out. Last week another guy was here with a power washer. Tomorrow yet another will be here to putty nail holes and prime the new woodwork.

All of these guys have been younger than 30. They're all contractors working for another under-30 guy -- the painter. He's contracted to paint my house from yet another under-30 guy that runs a small HVAC and remodeling service. This looks like a P2P company to me.

It's not the holistic model Seb describes, or even the more capitalistic version about which I wrote.

They're grounded by geography -- not virtual. They work with their hands -- not knowledge work. But they are inarguably a P2P organization -- a structured group of independent operators working together on a project-by-project basis.

Seb asks rhetorically, "... do we really still need companies?" The answer is yes, but they need not necessarily be the monolithic structures of Worldcom or Microsoft or 3M. They can instead be much more agile, much more adaptable -- someone to get the work, someone to organize the work, and someone to do the work, with all parties able to perform any or all of the functions.

I sometimes wonder if we don't become so absorbed in our virtual environments and collaborative technologies we forget that the physical world can still teach us lessons: