Pros
The best experience a business can provide is similar to the best role that a parent can provide their child. The business must support the growth and development of its units, while enabling them to evolve and grow into their own individuated entities.
The role of a parent must be to nurture, support and love the individuation, but another important component is the demonstration of shared values by example, not strictly by directive.
This is where fabriik leads. Fabriik leads by being bold and growing into the model by which future business will be conducted. And by demonstrating this growth, they make it easier to communicate and replicate for others. Ultimately, this enables not only us as people, but us as collaborative, free-functioning business entities who participate in a shared economy to serve each other's needs by being driven first and foremost by our values that we hold ourselves to.
And this is one of the key challenges and opportunities of leading a market. If you're truly leading the market, then you'll necessarily be engaging with other entities who've not demonstrated the same commitment to values, and who even may be secretly seeking to tear you down or subvert you.
But how we hold ourselves when everything is going well is not the true test of our commitment to our values. Because anyone can walk the walk when the road is smooth. But it's when the road becomes less traveled that we truly see if we live by these values or not. And in my estimation, fabriik is an example of the best that is possible when humans work together to achieve something great.
We must both lift and also be lifted by the example set by our Senior Leadership, and that requires simultaneously seeking to be both grounded and ungrounded at the same time. And this can be difficult, but when we enable our efforts to be guided by values, then it becomes clear when is appropriate to be either.
Cons
What is a con? Is a con something that personally conflicts with my viewpoint? Well that depends on whether I feel everyone should possess my view point? If we all walked around thinking and talking like me, then how would I be challenged?
The cons are that courage, curiosity, collaboration and clarity require that we become unmoored from our fixed view. It prevents us from retreating to the comfort of our habits and our routines. It forces us to get up and give a damn about something, and that means that we'll occasionally try and we'll fail!
And that failure is hard to face. But this is the inherent problem with trying to change the world. You're going against the entire world! And when that effort is in service of YOUR personal gain, then you will be trampled by the countless hordes of people and companies who are operating for THEIR personal gain, but when that effort is in service of building, designing and supporting a deeper integrated, more collaborative, more free-functioning system on which the world can more authentically emerge and see its own patterns of behavior and confront the places where it's thinking too small, then you won't be trampled but will be elevated. But this elevation is not by the world for your benefit, it is of and for the world for their benefit. And you accomplish this by living your values and by being an example to others of the way in which they too can lift and support the beautiful cacophony that is the modern, digital world.
