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The business model of X
This article study in an (not so) humorous way the internal mechanisms of key institutions.
Starting hypothesis
An institution even if not declared "for profit" can studied with a pseudo business model despite the fact that it didn't build one explicitly.
This unified analysis framework is supposed to permit to find interesting patterns despite the supposed differences of nature of those institutions.
Warning
This framework intend to help realize that institutions behave like financial institution while promoting the opposite.
This article does not endorse a monetary vision of society but try to show another perspective to analyze social structures.
If institutions leaders manage their institutions like financial institutions, using a similar framework despite rejecting it morally, might be the best solution.
Principle
Institutions are just a group of individual with a common goal. They are considered key in the sense that they are central in social networks.
Key institutions are part of an economical system larger than themselves. They consequently follow it's intrinsic rules and have to provide a service or a product for a price. What they do and which strategy they use is their business model.
Business model of those institutions have very likely evolved over time. One must thus be careful when looking at what they were doing centuries ago can be as it could induce a bias.
By understanding the strategy of other player helps you to play better and those are major players. Ignoring, or worse believing what they say is their strategy, is a very risky bet.
The business model of States
Military-industrial complex and the "growing insecurity" propaganda (nothing new, Goebbels and many before him)
- security while promoting freedom
- even specialized states
- Swiss Luxembourg security of money
- CyberBunker/SeaLand security of data
- SeaSteading security of... other states?
- end product : land
- income : direct from taxes or indirect from exportation of non physical goods (especially military researches from energy and weapons)
- marketing techniques : tourism, culture
The business model of Schools
top US school were funded but also post-napoleonian elitist schools (nothing new, top education kept for leaders since the maya and before)
- employability while promoting knowledge and liberty of thinking #chomsky2002
- end product : employable worker, optionally citizen
- income : direct from worker or indirect from its state (scholarship) or corporation (formation)
- marketing techniques : network of alumni
The business model of Churches
no one wants to be alone, excluded or marginated (gregarious instincts)
- end product : moral code with supporting community
- income : direct from tax-free donations or indirect from derived products (books, icons, ...)
- marketing techniques : social pressure
The business model of Media
- "available brain time" while promoting information
everybody needs information and stay up to date to current events and the upcoming trends.
- end product : information segmented per community
- income : advertisement
- marketing techniques : social pressure
Media actually sell "available brain time" (cf Patrick Le Lay quote in "Les dirigeants face au changement") and in order to do so produce an information flow based on a continuous succession of events (cf Francois Brune in "Le Bonheur Conforme") without any care about the importance of it beside how many attention it can gather.
Media are most of the time Two-sided market, it is thus crucial to understand what the product really is.
The business model of Y
Institutions Ys to study :
- NGO (ex: ?)
- NPO (ex: ?)
- supra-national institutions (ex: U.N. , F.M.I. , W.B. , ...)
- Political Campaigns ? (and the prices of tools described in Politics : the new and the old tools)
- any suggestion ?
Common pattern
All those institutions use those mechanism but with different "data" and to different degrees. They consequently all have competitive advantage thus specific markets (some may actually overlap others and create specific quasi-symbiotic relations).
Network externalities
The adhesion of each members empower the institution.
Cohesion
Shared set of values and maintenance of the established statu-quo generally justified by tradition.
Rejection of alternatives
A member can not be part of multiple institutions or is "suggested" to focus his efforts on only one.
Voluntary Servitude
Consented obedience to the system of laws (or shared set of values) formalized by rules, explicit or implicit and enforced by peer pressure.
Evolution
changed over time and that institutions evolved if the needed they covered were filled before.
Examples
- road buildings with some states, once the infrastructure is there they have to change for sth else.
- church with monks, they don't write books or are not knowledge workers anymore know that it is free and cheap.
Inspiration
- reading yet another quote about Eisenhower Military-Industrial-Complex #Eisenhower
- discussing with a CyberBunker minister
- remembering Etienne de la Boetie "Discours de la Servitude Volontaire"
- The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein
Upstream/Downstream
Connects pretty well with my previous study on institutional biases. Here we studies what drives those institutions and trying to answer the previous question that ended this presentation to "understand the motivations behind each proxy [institution]".
References
- Zinn : A People's History Of The United States
- Bifo : Cognitariat & Semiokapital
- President Eisenhower, in his final address to the nation before leaving office in 1961, issues a rather extraordinary warning to the American people that the country "must guard against unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." David McGowan, Derailing Democracy, (Common Courage Press, 2000), p.1
- "We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together." Dwight D. Eisenhower
- Understanding Power, Noam Chomsky, 2002, page236 : "if he got a C in a course, nobody cared, but if he went to school three minutes late he was sent to the principal's office -and that generalized. He realized that what it meant is, what's valued here is the ability to work on an assembly line, even if it's an intellectual assembly line"
- Mario Savio on the steps of UC Berkeley’s Sproul Hall, 1960 : "We have an autocracy which runs this university. It’s managed. We were told the following: If President Kerr actually tried to get something more liberal out of the Regents in his telephone conversation, why didn’t he make some public statement to that effect? And the answer we received, from a well-meaning liberal, was following: He said, ‘Would you ever imagine the manager of a firm making a statement publicly in opposition to his board of directors?’ That’s the answer! Well I ask you to consider: if this is a firm, and if the board of regents are the board of directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I tell you something — the faculty are a bunch of employees! And we’re the raw material! But we’re a bunch of raw materials that don’t mean to have any process upon us, don’t mean to be made into any product, don’t mean to end up being bought by some clients of the university, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We’re human beings!"
- L’Inflation scolaire. Les désillusions de la méritocratie de Marie Duru-Bellat pour La Republique des Idees, janvier 2006
- "Government is an industry with a really high barrier to entry," by Patri Friedman
Ideas to integrate
- la retraite est un outil pr fixer un travailleur locallement
To explore
- Confessions of an Economic Hit Man: How the U.S. Uses Globalization to Cheat Poor Countries Out of Trillions
- The ABC's of Political Economy: A Modern Approach by Robin Hahnel
- Tax Justice Network
- Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto
- NationMaster - World Statistics, Country Comparisons a massive central data source and a handy way to graphically compare nations.
- Stage Design Magic as Propaganda Tool : the design of the U.S. military's press room in Qatar
- The Division of Mental Labor …and Beyond by Bruce LaDuke, HyperAdvance, August 2008
- The Intellectual Assembly Line is Already Here, Willem H. Vanderburg, Bulletin of Science Technology and Society, v24 n4 p331-341 Aug 2004
- Digital diploma mills: The automation of higher education by David F Noble, First Monday Volume 3 Number 1, 1998
- "universities are not only undergoing a technological transformation. Beneath that change, and camouflaged by it, lies another: the commercialization of higher education".
- advocated by the OECD, see the education section of the OECD website
- see also World-systems approach
