Companies of the future: No CEO, no boss, managed by blockchain

Look at Enron, for example, setting up fake trading floors, or lying to investors. What happens inside organizations is opaque. This is a fundamental characteristic of public corporations because if shareholders got full transparency, then a rival business could purchase 1 share of stock, or have an agent purchase 1 share of stock, and then they would know everything happening inside of their competitor. A vendor could purchase 1 share of stock, and gain access to competitive pricing information, etc. So corporations are necessarily secretive. They embargo information, and they don't provide a lot of specifics. They give only roll up summaries to public investors and don't release enough information for investors to verify that the summaries are correct.

None of that will change at all with blockchain. This isn't a technological problem, where we don't have a way of correctly tallying votes, or we lack mechanisms of sharing information with investors, so thank God blockchain came along so we'd know how to hold elections.

As long as anyone can dispose or acquire a share in the open market, corporations are going to withhold most of the details from shareholders.

It doesn't matter what protocols the shareholders are going to use to reach agreement or count votes. They will never have enough visibility into the workings of the corporation in order to be able to enforce this type of micromanagement.

Going back to actually addressing the problem -- the current state of the art is to have third party auditor verify the roll up summary statements. This auditor is necessarily bound to secrecy -- e.g. they cannot disclose to shareholders the proprietary information that went into verifying the summaries. The state of the art is to trust these auditors and to have penalties for making misleading statements. However these audits are necessarily a manual and expensive process, as they require judgement to classify millions of transactions into known categories which then roll up to income and balance sheet statements. How would blockchain help here? The transaction is secret, and without the appropriate contextual information, we don't know how to classify it. Is this working capital, should that be booked as revenue for this quarter, should we do a Goodwill write off, etc? But if shareholders can't be trusted with enough contextual information to adjudicate even these types of classification problems, how are they going to adjudicate the hundreds of thousands of smaller decisions that happen every day in a firm? On the other hand, if we are relying on third party auditors, then what do we need the blockchain for?

Why do they pick the bad examples to serve as the argument for what they are trying to shove down our throats?

What about the Good Boss? The person you look up to, the holder of the company vision, the one that motivates you - even without talking to you? Someone who's there, simply put.

Are they so disconnected from reality that they forget we're talking about people here? Do they think people would want to work for an organization without a head, who's directives trickle down from a blockchain decision in a memo on their email boxes?

There are plenty of examples where the board had no clue what they are talking about, because there's only that much that can be carried on a report.

This is ridiculous.

The main thing it says to me is that the contractor of the future has to be adept at marketing and communicating to an audience of shareholders in the company, as well as doing their job.

I would guess that most contractors wouldn't make the grade according to investors. After a few rounds of abject failures, I would reckon that the investors would come up with a scheme where they hire someone to intermediate for them.. someone who could better speak the contractors' language in order to deliver requirements. While they're at it, this person could also manage the schedule. Such a scheme would make it so the technician would only have to communicate to one person instead of a large group.

Eventually this intermediator would get so busy that they'd no longer have the time or energy to communicate with this army of people, so they'd have to hire someone else to do it for them...