MWMD - Market Weapons Of Mass Dispersion

Little did he know, the Social Infrastructure was Already In Place for the stockpiling and emanant launch of MWMD … Market Weapons of Mass Dispersion.

In contrast to the MWMD (Make-believe Weapons of Mass Destruction) which have plunged us all into the largest financial morass in our nation’s history, this site recently introduced the concept of a different kind of MWMD in the shape of a Giant Mushroom Shaped Cloud of Free Market Correction, inelegantly dubbed the Giant PIFWOD Bomb.

What I did not take the time to go into was the idea that the collaborators in this experiment were not to ever be “interviewed and hired” in the traditional sense of the word. There should be “killer b-plan,” no “secret sauce,” no “patent pending,” no “pre-wired deal” involved. As imagined in recent months, and as I described the concept to my colleague BW, the idea included, “just gathering a group of really smart and talented people into a company structure and letting them CREATE.”

No initial mission statement. No product spec. No MRD’s, ERD’s, or any other preconceptions. Obviously, many of those things could eventually become manifest as the group decides what it wants to do, but initially, just a group of Smart and Capable People intent on constructing, testing, and detonating some variation of THE BOMB.

Little did I know, an ideal grassroots movement was already well underway, right underfoot. Despite actively attending many semi-related conferences and generally staying active in the community, in the relative isolation of my own independent-worker status, I had not yet discovered the phenomenon of Coworking.

This highly clueful cohort is deploying various permutations of today’s individual and interpersonal productivity tools and further experimenting with meeting places that could provide an ideal environment to encourage and reward “individuality without isolation,” in the words of Office Nomads in Seattle. These environments could potentially provide and ideal testbed for the theories outlined by the PIFWOD concept. This could mean that the Era of Socially Conscious Capitalism, Free Market Socialism, or whatever you want to call the Market-Based Correction to Market-Induced Resource Imbalances Attributable to Various Market Failures of Information and Opportunity Flow, could begin very soon.

One of my heroes of this trend toward socially conscious enterprise is Whole Foods (WFMI) founder and CEO, John Mackey. While competitors have come on strong over that past two years (as a result of WFMI raising the bar), a glance at a ten year chart of ascent for WFMI from Dec 1994 - Dec 2005 empirically demonstrates that Mackey has proven that Wall Street principles of profit and competition can indeed be tweaked to more perfectly allocate the rewards of market success, while not only staying competitive, but redefining sector leadership.

This is incontrovertible evidence that salary caps do not destroy capitalism. Far from it, smart salary caps EMPOWER and EMBOLDEN Free Market Capitalism to do more good than ever. Gordon Gecko is right … “Greed is Good” and Greed Works … and it can work for EVERYONE, not just the top 1% or 2%, without some hyperbolic quantum leap to the downside of communism as the detractors from Socially Responsible Enterprise would like to have us believe.

The only trick is, YOU AND I HAVE TO DO THIS IN THE FREE MARKET. Such caps should not be mandated or imposed by government or any other outside brute force organization. These caps must be MARKET DRIVEN by actors like us who understand that this is the best way to IMPROVE overall Free Market Efficiency and Innovation by better distributing the rewards to a wider and more diverse population of innovators than ever before in history.

WFMI’s Salary Cap limits the total cash compensation that can be paid to any Team Member. Every executive, including Mackey himself, is a “Team Member.” While the Board of Directors voted to raise the salary cap from 14 times the average pay to 19 times the average pay in 2006, that only further served to prove that the model can be flexible and adaptive to market conditions without wildly swinging the pendulum from one extreme to another. This is not communism, ye amygdalic trolls … look again at the STOCK PRICE over time.

WFMI provides a great Case Study that empirically validates the general concept of Socially Responsible Capitalism in the conservative mainstream NASDAQ context. In contrast, the Giant PIFWOD Bomb does indeed seek to swing the pendulum just a bit more, in order to free up and catalyze the energies of larger numbers of bright and capable poeple by implementing the traditional startup model in a novel and disruptive way that I expect will dramatically accelerate and democratize entrepreneurship.

So, look forward to seeing you at the office, soon. Our post-human, post-imbalance, post-zero-sum, post-myopic future beckons.