Earlier this year I quit my promising IT consulting career to explore this very fact – is there a way to make a living which is in harmony with how one wants to live one’s life – in consideration of human value, environment, community, and all other aspects that we (or most of us) would like to leave as a legacy. Five months down the road I am still struggling to find such an environment in the corporate sector. I am sure it exists but I have not yet ‘stumbled upon’ it.

It is good to ask questions about value. It is even better to answer them with sustainable and realistically viable options. IT has become a field of much chatter and hype where each day we find some everyday operational common sense getting patented or named with a jazzy new term, where the vendor’s product rather than the organization’s problem dictates what solution will be put in place.

A great thing about upcoming technologies, Web 2.0, etc is the increased quality and quantity of collaboration at all levels of society. At this stage of IT and society, it is important to witness that people are coming together, regardless of what they are coming together for, independent of organizational or governmental or even societal structures. It is my fervent prayer and hope (dare I use that word) that this will eventually lead to tearing down of bureaucratic walls and narrow mental/physical/geographical divides that keep a problem from meeting its optimal solution effectively and efficiently.

For example, I personally believe that money was put forward as the one, only and most important value in our institutionalized society partly to make up for the complexity of our institutions. All the free market philosophy seems to be based on the assumption that yes, our companies are complex, but if money is the sole exchange artifact, then it will be in the best interest of everyone to earn as much money as possible, and everything follows. Of course, we can see now how this very principle is too simplistic and has turned the system on its head. Hear me right: I’m not one of those revived socialists who would like us to go back to the other extreme. What I think is that we should get the system back on its feet, and use what you call Collabs as a way to put less emphasis on the means and more on the end. Let’s simplify our structures and elaborate more on our goals. We want to move forward, we want to create value, but value should not be limited to money. What about human value? What about environmental value? What about technological value?

What Clay Shirky is talking about (and I agree with him) is a complete change, not only in how we work, but also why we work. I don’t think we can separate one from the other.

So yes, independent and individual decision on collaboration does sound like a better alternative than an organization. However, the collaborating groups will need to address issues of administration, finance, etc, which caused organizations to lose their sense of identity in the first place (as staying operational over shadowed staying true to vision). Perhaps the solution is similar to what organizations already tried – in Druker’s words (his advice to Jack Welsh) – ‘make sure your back office work is someone elses front office work’. Does that mean Collabs (collaborating groups) to meet problems of existing Collabs? One Collab to solve world hunger and another Collab to address its organizational structure, another to manage Finances and so on?

The other possibility is to have a Collab comprising of individuals who can manage themselves, are visionaries, are honest people who can work on a task without being influenced by self-interest…. Very unlikely. So although I understand and can relate to the appeal of Collabs I am not clear on their functional and operational model and how over time they will not become burdened with similar problems as their Organizational counterparts.