Companies on a shared ledger

Much of what a large company does today is that coordinating work: approvals, scheduling, purchasing, compliance reports, budget rounds, meetings. Agents are about to make most of it cheap. When coordination gets cheap, the edge of the firm moves.

It is a choice to keep four records that anyone dealing with it can check:

• What goes in: energy, materials, water, hours of work, computing, and what the company holds (buildings, machines, cash, patents, data).
• What comes out: the goods and services it delivers.
• What happened afterwards, as reported by the people who received them: did the roof last the winter, did the software keep working.
• What it cost others: the hidden human and environmental costs.

Workers’ private lives stay private. A worker’s own agent can prove a single fact, such as a completed safety course, and nothing else. What becomes visible is the company as a holder of power, not the people inside it.

It would happen in stages. First the company’s agents run silently alongside its managers for a year, recording what they would have decided. Then the records go public. Then coordinating work moves to agents, one task at a time, only where the shadow year showed they do it better. Last, ownership can move to a member-owned co-operative. That step has precedents in employee ownership, which several countries already support in law.

Established companies hold a great deal of capacity nobody uses: cash far beyond what operations need, empty office floors, half-empty warehouses, patents filed only to block others.

Under a rule the company’s members choose, value tied to idle capacity above a protected safety reserve slowly drifts back to the commons unless put to productive use.

What you hold, you use

Today holding idle capacity costs little, and can even raise a share price. The way to stop the drift is simple: put the capacity to use. Lend the empty warehouse, license the patent, run the idle machine for someone else’s order.

What you improve, you are recognised for

Each period, the company’s verified results are compared with its verified footprint, against its own past and against the standard for similar work. Gains above the standard earn recognition for the people and agents who produced them, not for whoever owns the shares. Two safeguards keep this honest:

• The bar rises. Japan has done this for appliances since 1999: the most efficient product on the market sets the standard everyone must meet a few years later. A gain earns recognition while it is ahead of the field, then becomes the new normal.
• The whole footprint counts. In 1865 William Stanley Jevons noticed that more efficient steam engines increased Britain’s coal use, because cheaper power found more uses. Halving energy per item and then selling four times as many items is not an improvement.

Together the two cycles push a company’s value toward one question: what would everyone lose if this company stopped tomorrow?

Agents can audit every transaction as it happens, test a plan in simulation before committing to it, match work to the people suited to it, and be evaluated and replaced when they stop doing well.

What stays with people: deciding what the company is for and what it will not do.

The law also still requires human directors in most places. And every worker’s own agent stands between that worker and the company’s agents, checking schedules against what was agreed and refusing unsafe instructions.

There is a real cost. Many people who do coordinating work today would lose that work. A plan to move a company onto the ledger that does not provide for those people, through new roles, training and a guaranteed minimum, is not ready to start.

An efficiency offer is a public offer of recognition for a verified improvement: for example, “recognition for whoever cuts this plant’s water use by a fifth without adding harm, measured for a year by independent observers.” Anyone can answer with a solution, research, or resources such as equipment or funding.

The idea is old in pieces. Britain offered a prize for finding longitude at sea in 1714. Donors have paid vaccine makers only once vaccines were delivered. Energy service companies are paid from the savings they produce. What has been missing is someone to spot the opportunities and measure them. Soon, cheap drones with thermal cameras, image classifiers and sensors that remember a site over time will be able to survey a building or a plant, with its owner’s consent, and draft the offer. They watch roofs, boilers and machines, never people.

When a solution works, recognition is shared along everyone whose work led to it: the people who designed it, the researchers it built on, those who lent equipment, and the staff who made it work on site.

Transitioning companies onto a shared ledger with open efficiency offers creates strong incentives for employee ownership and waste reduction, while requiring safeguards against baseline gaming and sudden displacement.

• We want thisSmall companies convert and keep their value

  Owners who are retiring hand their companies to the people who work there, and the two cycles keep value tied to use.

  For example: a 40-person bakery whose founder retires becomes a co-operative, lends its ovens to two start-ups overnight, and its recorded value rises as its idle capacity falls.

• We want to avoid thisOffers are gamed

  Companies waste more before posting an offer, then collect recognition for fixing what they caused.

  For example: a warehouse runs its lights twice as long in the year before an offer, then “saves” half its energy by switching them back off.

• We want to avoid thisCoordinating jobs vanish without a plan

  Agents take over scheduling, reporting and approvals, and the people who did that work are left without income.

  For example: an insurer moves its claims scheduling to agents and lets 300 coordinators go in one quarter, with no retraining.

• We want thisEveryone helps find the gains

  Open offers draw solutions from far outside the company, and proven ones spread.

  For example: a student’s design for a school heating offer cuts gas use by a fifth, and 30 more schools adopt it within a year.