More on Guilds

OK, great. Whatever. Even in BF Skinner’s Walden Two, neither society nor society are this open. This is a great ideal, but it dissolves the corporate veil. The organization exists to serve it’s constituents and in most organizations, guidelines, guardrails, and limits are placed. OK. So how do we reign this in and still be true to the vision?

A flat organization is managed as a guild based organization. Guilds are mean cruel and archaic structures. They rose to power in the medieval era and are alternatively seen as the epitome of Adam Smith and Karl Marx. It is argued that guilds stifled trade, inhibited innovation, and distorted the distribution of wealth; or completely the opposite. In fact, all craft guilds pursued pious goals. In addition to the regulations governing their crafts, guilds were both benevolent and religious societies governed by strict rules for mutual aid, arbitration and the procuring of spiritual benefits*.

Even granted the separation of Church and State and there is much that we can take from the guilds. There is also much we can leave. There are also some things that rise from the operation of guilds that is worth noting, but only so that we can recognize bad behaviors and nip them in the bud. One such behavior is the way guild masters both poached promising upstarts and colluded against others masters in the same guild**. So, leaving out organized religion and collusion and some other practices that were frankly reproachable, what do we actually have left that is not so left of center that we end up with technical communes (though these may actually not be a bad idea – think Semler***)?

The guilds saw achievement of mastery in their craft as a means of achieving piety. In the Medieval eras the piety was to a deity. Though much has been written in western literature about the Christian based guilds, the Eastern religions used the same construct and organization. If we translate the piety into reverence to a product or technology vision instead, we immediately have a solid relationship to our businesses.



* Gary Richardson, “Craft Guilds and Christianity” and Sylvia Thrupp, “The Merchant Class of Medieval London”

** From Craft and Christianity, p155:
As long as the masters maintained a solid front, all of them profited from the pact. Journeymen were forced to accept lower wages. Journeymen had few other options. But, masters had trouble maintaining the pact. Collusion was in the collective interest of all masters but not in the personal interest of an individual master. One of the masters – perhaps bit smarter or greedier than the others – would realize he could cheat his colleagues just as he could cheat his subordinates. After the other masters had lowered wages, he could offer remuneration or working conditions slightly more attractive than the collusive level and hire the most talented journeymen. His shop would be productive and profitable. Other masters would observe his success, and then try to outbid him for the worthiest workers. Bidding would escalate until the cabal broke down and wages returned to the market clearing level. In other words, the masters could not carry out their self-serving plot unless they could (a) determine who was adhering to the pact and who was not and (b) reward the former or punish the later, so that all masters had an incentive to maintain the cartel.

*** Ricardo Semler – See his books Maverick or The 7 Day Weekend.