You, as a banker, provide a service - certainly in the analysis of risk, and, to a certain extent, the actuarial strategies. But from a societal POV, you are using the same methodology as would be used for a new sausage factory. The fact that the product you finance is 'good' is a coincidence. Or is it?

Putting together a movie or a TV series requires at least the same effort, disappointments, crassness, documentation, late night intensive sessions, and celebration of completion. We all work hard.

I've suffered the problems of 'dispersed ownership' in my dealings with Swedish companies. It CAN be exasperating. But it is also invigorating. It ensures that all views are heard.

Many of these 'views' are difficult to include. We elitists dismiss these views as anecdotal or irrelevant. They are, agreed, rarely fully informed. But they are the views of people who will be affected by the decisions taken.

It has been - prior to 1995 - possible to ignore the views of those who question the top-down nature of society and its subset, business. No longer.

Can I also add that you don't seem to read what people write. Chris Cook emphasised several times that air miles should be easy to understand as a meme, not that what he was proposing was equivalent to air miles. But no. Your argument was about the about the misfit of the analogy.

The technology that allows a French energy banker to start a very intelligent blog/forum is the same technology that will allow 'dispersed ownership'.

You can't be me, I'm taken

See my last point about agency roles.

There is no principal and no agent in a partnership relationship.

Jerome a Paris:

Dispersed "ownership" makes for decisions not to be taken when required.

The ability to share risk and reward within a partnership framework enables the rights and obligations of the property relationship thought of as 'ownership' to be distributed simply and effectively in new ways.

Having been involved among many other interesting projects, in:

(a) drafting and implementing the detailed contract rules of a successful global energy exchange;

(b) clearing house provisions relating to default;

(c) cross border clearing relationships;

(d) the creation of a globally applicable market user agreement in the context of a 'Dot Com'; and

(e) detailed development of new market products and trading mechanisms;

I have some idea about complexity and resilience in contractual relationships.

I also have getting on for ten years' experience of developing simpler consensual ways of contracting which may not yet be familiar to you, but which are entirely familiar (say) to any Japanese businessman.


"The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed" William Gibson