There are attempts to tiptoe around this problem with holacracies and Agile methodologies and similar concepts, but the main problem still remains.
[0] In reality, I would have to spend some time trimming down the list of 50 based on influence. Which is not always an easy signal to find.
I cannot stress enough how awful the opposite of this is. Coming into work every day and wondering why any of this is going on as if we're in some WWI mindless-war hell, why we are even doing this in the first place after all of the legitimate and serious objections were flat out trashed, "process du jour" being a very real thing for extended periods of time.
... and all this at not a startup but at established top-tier companies.
Clear decisions, common direction, and stated intentions are wonderful.
Democratic cooperative doesn't mean that everything has to be voted on. It can have hierarchy, if employees find such arrangement useful; the point is that you have a (collective) right to overrule it.
The way to fix this is to have honest, open discussion to collectively arrive at a vision. That way, there is no cognitive dissonance between the vision and the team members. The problem is, this is hard and requires a lot of trust. I'd recommend reading The Five Dysfunctions of a Team [0] if you really want to dig into this philosophy.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_Dysfunctions_of_a_Tea...
I don't disagree, but now you seem to claim something else. Originally you just wanted a strong vision with goals, regardless whether the employees agree. Now you want buy-in too.
And there is also principle of subsidiarity. If people strongly disagree on the vision, they can come to some compromise where they realize each vision in their own domains. (As John Carmack put it: "if you are not sure, explore both solutions".)
I don't understand the perspective you are asking this question from. But, my responsibility would be to follow my boss' vision. If it has clear and achievable goals, then it's easy for me to figure out what to do. Visions which are too broadly scoped won't have clear and achievable goals. Visions which are too narrowly scoped is micromanagement.
I might not always agree, but in those cases I will voice my ideas / concerns. After I know I've been heard out, I will defer because it's my boss' decision to make, not mine. As long as my concerns are heard and integrated into the decision, then I should be content.
> I don't disagree, but now you seem to claim something else. Originally you just wanted a strong vision with goals, regardless whether the employees agree. Now you want buy-in too.
There's a clear delineation between leadership -- aka, vision-creation -- and implementation. My original opening of "as an employee" was meant to frame the remainder of my comment as from the perspective of someone responsible for implementing a vision. The remainder of the discussion has been about the leadership side, or how to create a vision in the first place. If you are creating a vision with a group, you need buy-in from the entire group. If you don't, then individual leadership will walk away with differing interpretations and goals, which is what leads to dysfunction. These separate visions will then be pushed down the line, and you will have implementers working at cross-purposes, political infighting, etc.
This ~~synchronicity~~ synchronization on the leadership side is the important part. If a unified vision is being clearly pushed to all the implementers, then the collective action will result in a singular vector towards the vision. If unclear or even competing visions are being pushed, then you won't get collective movement because all the individual actions will be moving towards different results.
> And there is also principle of subsidiarity. If people strongly disagree on the vision, they can come to some compromise where they realize each vision in their own domains.
It's one thing to acknowledge that there are two potential solutions, and as a group decide that both will be explored. It's a completely different situation to have two groups that can't come to terms and are therefore competing against each other.
EDIT: Big words are hard. Let's go shopping.
Well, "the ownership of capital", in a lot of public companies, is basically an absentee landlord. So it's not entirely about ownership, but rather about management. You can have cooperatives that are de-facto feudal/tyrannical structures, and private companies that are de-facto democracies.
I'll take a monarchy over 5-hour meetings where nothing is decided and the room hates each other any day.
Because 99.9% of typical workers don't have the money to build the business.
Take for example, Google Inc. origins in 1998. Both L Page and S Brin came from upper middle class families but neither of their bank accounts nor their parents' bank accounts had $25 million to spend on a business. It's also doubtful if either family could have been approved for a $25m unsecured business loan from a bank. Likewise, Google's first 100 employeees also didn't collectively have $25 million. On the other hand, VCs like Sequioa and KPCB did have $25 million to invest. Later on, more investors bought IPO shares totaling $1.9 billion. There is no union of workers that can pool together that kind of cash.
Since a co-op by definition must be owned by the workers, the question is no longer "interesting" with a mysterious answer. Instead, it's tautological. If you look at the typical workers' modest savings as the ceiling for funding a business, it's obvious why they can't compete with businesses built by investors/capitalists money. While WorkersOwnedSearchEngine Inc scrapes together $30,000 from their owners-workers' savings accounts to buy a 5th rack server from dell.com, Google Inc. can use a fraction of its $2 billion war chest to buy an entire data center and also break ground on a brand new one.
As long as the coop members have 50% +1 that ok but it can go wrong (thank you very much ICANN) as we found at poptel.
The other problem is the coop movement in general is very old fashioned and isn't really embracing technical changes. Which is a pity as if poptel had been brought out by the main uk coop we woudl have all had a very nice 6 figure payday.
And you do get into silly arguments over exactly which version of STV you use ;-)
1. Cooperatives don't have strong incentives to grow, because growing typically means more people and that means sharing of power, accordingly. Their growth is probably limited by trust.
2. When someone has the ability to start the company, they won't probably want to do it as a cooperative. It's harder to start a good cooperative than just a company. This is a corollary of 1.
3. It's much harder to raise capital for a cooperative because of possibly misaligned incentives. Even though capitalist's companies suffer from principal agent problem too, this is enough to dissuade many potential investors. Since cooperatives are not very common, this is a chicken-egg problem.
4. As someone else mentioned, democracies tend to be pretty conservative. This can be good in the long term, but makes them vulnerable to well-planned short term attacks from the outside.
Workers' coops also have limited access to capital and business expertise which can make them difficult to get started, but the reason they don't grow large is the reason above.
However, it is totally fine for workers coops to remain small businesses for their entire existence, all that would mean for is that we need more of them to be started.
Is the fraction of co-operatives that fail larger than the fraction of failures in alternative structures?
Capitalism gives employees control; your life has changed immediately after you exercise your option to exit. Voting simply doesn't.
It's also potentially very harmful, due to the principal/agent problem. Every agent (employee) has the incentive to loot the company, build empires, and protect their job. But such things are of course very bad for organizations.
This is made worse by democracy, because not only do voters have no incentive to do what's best for the organization, they can do whatever makes them feel good (since their vote doesn't matter).
(As an example of the principal/agent problem, witness Marisa Mayer vs Starboard. She wants to keep her job and build her empire at Yahoo. Shareholders want to avoid paying taxes on Alibaba, which will destroy far more value than the Yahoo empire could ever plausibly be worth.)
I'd say the ideals of a worker cooperative is that the workers _are_ the organization. The organization is a means to an end for all workers benefit. Not the other way around as is usually the case in a totalitarian capitalistic one.
And yes you're right, Capitalism gives you as much control giving as any totalitarian system, quitting/exile.
As the goal of worker cooperatives is usually not to become multi-nationals I'm not sure how low your bar is for when ones vote become absolutely futile.
You observe this effect in national politics all the time - for instance, the emotional benefit of voting for a cool guy like Trump drastically exceeds P(vote effects outcome) x (Delta in outcomes). Last time I checked, I had to approximate P(vote effects outcome) by hand because it was too small to represent with double precision floating point numbers.
As other commenter said, you can always exit. But democracy gives you explicit right to change things (albeit no bigger than to other people in the organization), which is actually a more efficient method of introducing change than fatalistically wait until the dysfunctional organization dies.
I fail to see how this is any different than in any other job, at least for non top level management.