Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

Remote work eliminates the emotional content of the communication channel between workers.

That is bad for team cohesion and serendipitous collaboration. Humans have evolved a number of emotions that enable us to work together even when it's not in our immediate self-interest: guilt and shame to realize when we've hurt somebody else and discourage us from doing it again, excitement to pick up on and pile into promising ideas created by others, compassion to help out members of the group who have fallen behind, trust to suspend disbelief and commit to a direction without knowing exactly where it will take you. Teams that lack this communication channel tend to spin apart into little atoms each doing their own thing. Without feeding off each others' excitement, there's little common purpose. Without compassion, it's easy for some workers to fall behind and slow everyone down. Without trust, the team can never take on a goal where the outcome is uncertain or unknown at inception time.

Status-signalling is a byproduct of this emotional communication channel. It's people gaming the system to generate the emotions that the group needs to function without actually doing the work.

I'd love to see remote work become viable too, but it needs a viable way of solving the "presence problem", the need for emotions to come through remotely as well as pure factual information. Without that, you throw the baby out with the bathwater. I looked into this when I was searching for startup ideas recently, but all technologies I could think of were easily 5-10 years away from being viable.

I grew up with parents who worked in healthcare (my dad, specifically, has a ton of connections within the health and life insurance industry), I've sold health insurance, I now have a full-time job in a hospital system, and I'm working on launching a health insurance-related product (to augment Obamacare benefits for small businesses) and I can tell you, they didn't touch on many of the most important issues in the industry today.

I'm not going to criticize Obamacare, but there are a bunch of things they could've done that would've been easier to implement and easier to understand that would've fixed the system! For example, get rid of the PPOs and give the "discount" they provide to everyone. PPOs provide no real value and have basically stuck themselves in the middle of the transaction and inflated costs, which inflates insurance premiums. Getting rid of them would immediately reduce costs quite a bit and make healthcare (and, indirectly, health insurance) much more affordable.

I guess the politicians wouldn't outright get rid of a whole sector of an industry, though, which makes it harder...

When I sold health insurance, one of the things we would often suggest is, if possible, to get a cheap policy with a high deductible and simply put the difference into an emergency fund until you can cover the deductible. This gives you access to the PPO, so you can pay the reduced rates (which are actually quite affordable if you make a decent income!) if something happens, while making the whole thing much more affordable.

That's, in my opinion, one of the greatest problems with the world, the economy, and the education system today.

For one thing, we train people to be workers, so they can end up as cogs in the machine of the big corporate system.

Then, those that still want to be entrepreneurs have to jump through political and legal hoops to do so.

Isn't investment, velocity of money, and innovation what makes the system keep moving? Without these entrepreneurs and business owners/founders, where would the jobs be? Why not provide incentives to be business owners and innovators? Or at least nurture the ones who are predisposed to it rather than trying to stomp it out of them!

+1

I have a variety of company ideas, but I have several key issues:

- College loans. I pay close to my apartment costs in these.

- Health care for myself and family. Expensive!

- Living costs - moving to someplace really cheap to bootstrap would likely be horribly for my career and would drag hiring down significantly.

So I incur a fair amount of immediate costs, as well as future risk by quitting and starting my own company. I could probably handle the risk, but the immediate costs are.... high.

(If I thought I could have done something involving early loan repayment that I could have performed, I would have! But I didn't see any when I last checked).

Unfortunately, large companies can also much more easily engage in rent-seeking behaviour (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking) which small competitors can't engage in effectively unless they organize as a group (effectively a small business union)

Even worse, rent-seeking is often a better use of money than actually innovating in the market you supposedly compete in. If I can disadvantage all of my competitors with horrific regulations that severely penalize small size competitors, then I need to do nothing and rake in the cash.

So, its a tired refrain, but one of the other main issues is that our regulatory and governance bodies are just not agile enough to deal with companies that are, and actively manipulate them.

In some cases, that can be a benefit, as loopholes or slow response may allow companies to get established before regulation catches up and reams them, but if the big boys (JP, GE, Exxon, Apple, Walmart, ect..) are on the ball, they can effectively kill whole markets as they appear. Just regulate them away.