the spirit of cooperation Imagine a company like this: Let's call it Ideation. It spawns other baby-companies as products.

There are no mandatory financial ties between any daughter-company and momma-company. Worker satisfaction is a main company asset and is periodically measured. Worker suggestions are always welcome and listened to. In fact, it's mandatory to attempt to suggest improvements in Ideation procedures and practices. It's part of your job at Ideation to improve Ideation. How does Ideation make money? Investment, donations, and daughter-company gifts to momma. Workers share profits equally. Workers share losses equally. Workers agree on a bare-subsistence income level before starting. Investors are informed equally. In fact, all corporate financial documents are public domain. Everyone knows about every penny coming in and going out. Financial records are transparent .. The main criteria for working at Ideation is the spirit of cooperation. If you're not inclined to collaborate, cooperate, and share, you won't be working at Ideation. The next corporate value is raw creativity. If Ideation is an 'idea factory', individual workers at Ideation are veritable fountains of creativity. Third is our commitment to innovation; there's always a better way to do things. And fourth: we use the cooperative structure to model our baby-companies on. Otherwise, there's no difference from the authoritarian hierarchical profit based model currently dominating the rest of society .. There's no limit on the domain or sectors Ideation can contribute to. Movie production, advertising, security, hospitality, technology, health care, education, administration, resource development, infrastructure, communications,.. The list is endless. The point of Ideation is to evince a sustainable business model for the future. The point of Ideation is to provide a nurturing atmosphere for brilliant minds. The point of Ideation is to realize dreams of workers in practical ways that will benefit humanity .. Competition was the model America embraced when it was young, overflowing with unexploited resources. But resources are dwindling and we're running out of things and populations to exploit. Besides, we're maturing to the point we realize exploitation is not a healthy mode of living. It's not respectful to the environment nor each other. Competition and profit based thinking worked when America was young, but it's not sustainable .. The only use for competition in the future, other than athletics, is to measure how quickly social organizations can migrate toward the cooperative mode. A sub-definition or integral characteristic of cooperation is mutual respect. How quickly can our organizations shape-shift toward this ideal? It all depends on each organization's entrenchment in / attachment to / reluctance from / inertia toward group-centric values. It's like asking: How long will it take the average Muslim to treat a Buddhist as another Muslim? or How long will it take for all Jews to treat gentiles as Jews? Forever? A pessimist huh? i contend 'all it takes' is awareness: that we're all brothers and sisters on this planet, that we all deserve access to Earth's resources, and that we all need to focus on sustainable modes of existence .. Examining the Xprize, 'the spirit of competition', and our recent catastrophic failures in various sectors of our economies has made it ultra-clear to me: we desperately need to shift our mode of living from competition to cooperation. i implore you before it's too late: embrace the spirit of cooperation.