Valve once more. In their latest, extremely long blog post (split into chapters!) they dissect the meaning of firms and corporations from both a historical and a present-day perspective, and offer the views of several prominent thinkers on the subject.

Valve is known for its flat structure with no managers and with teams that organically group and reshape themselves. Through their successes they prove that their system is extremely effective even with their current 400 employees.

The current system of corporate governance is bunk. Capitalist corporations are on the way to certain extinction. Replete with hierarchies that are exceedingly wasteful of human talent and energies, intertwined with toxic finance, co-dependent with political structures that are losing democratic legitimacy fast, a form of post-capitalist, decentralised corporation will, sooner or later, emerge. The eradication of distribution and marginal costs, the capacity of producers to have direct access to billions of customers instantaneously, the advances of open source communities and mentalities, all these fascinating developments are bound to turn the autocratic Soviet-like megaliths of today into curiosities that students of political economy, business studies et al will marvel at in the future, just like school children marvel at dinosaur skeletons at the Natural History museum.