I think about business a lot, either analyzing and breaking down a business that is serving me or thinking about my own business. I’ve done that for quite sometime. Around 1999 or 2001, I hatched an idea: Someday huge corporations will be replaced by revolving teams of contractors. Employees will be expensive and pointless. Instead, you’ll just announce a need and pay those that deliver. Workers will no longer want or care to work for anyone but themselves. They’ll prefer to work on projects they pick with people they like vs risking their future on one single corporation.
My idea was crowdsourcing before the term was coined in 2006.
It occurred to me that business as it stood back then was flawed. It started out good, i.e. you wanted to farm out the work to a set of experts vs trying to futilely build it in house. Very quickly though the process failed. You then had to seek proposals, review each proposal, each proposal’s owner(s) had to be vetted, then a time frame was worked out, budgets setup, etc. All of which meant nothing because every project I ever saw in corporate America would go over budget and scope.
My idea was to skip the proposal and vetting stage. Let ’s face it. Most consultancy firms hire independent contractors anyways, i.e. you end up paying a markup of 50% to 100% just so Company A or Company B can hire Contractor A. Why not just get to Contractor A and his team for the project? Skip the middle man, go straight to the source. That’s what business is all about!
