A Communications Acknowledgement

Jerry and Jen,

Thanks for your encouraging comments. What can seem so obvious and necessary to do, and what can seem like such a long and painful process is very much an 'eye of the beholder' phenomena.

As Mike says, many of the growing pains we are going through are a function of basic entrepreneurship. I have been doing high-risk entrepreneurial start-up business (in the high tech area) for over 25 years. So some of what I see going on here is very much 'start up business as usual' when too few people are trying to do too much with too few resources, etc. Some of what is going on here is, however, very different.

One thing that is very different from other entrepreneurial ventures I have done is that we aren't in the 'crucible' of shared physical space. In the past, start-ups I have been in are a bunch of passionate and energetic folks spending all their time and energy in a single, shared location. Everybody knows (and sometimes likes) everybody else and everybody knows the stresses, strains and pressures of what is going on.

Also, in conventional entrepreneurial start-ups, while there may be shared ownership (of risk and reward), there is almost always one or a small number of founders who literally own more of the company and therefore have legitimate authority to exercise in saying who does what, how, etc.

Finally, while times can be lean during a start-up, there is usually some initial funding or cash-flow that allows folks to 'stay the course' and do what is expected of them.

In the case of the Chandler Guild, nearly every one of these factors is non-existent or significantly different. The lack of shared space means that we don't all have a clear sense of what is going on, who's doing what and just how much they are doing on our shared behalfs. I believe that this lack of shared experience is a VERY BIG deal as far as working through the growing pains of evolving the Chandler Guild.

Next, the Chandler Guild is a self-organizing, peer-managed business network. It is not in ANY way comparable to a 'conventional' business large or small that we each may have experienced. At this stage in this business network's evolution, we have a loose community of shared interest and partially shared ideas.

No one owns anything as we don't even yet know what the legal form of his organization will be. No one is in charge with legitimate authority because the thing we are doing is not yet real and no one 'owns' more of something than someone else, so no one can, therefore, not tell anyone what to do or how to do it.

Finally, no one is getting a direct financial reward from the 'sweat equity' we are putting into this community/business. Sure, Mike and the Warehouse Partners stand to benefit from the flow of wax and ancillary products they make available to community members. For that matter, any members who want to offer products or services to one another can benefit form the communication channel we are nurturing here. But this risk/reward is not strictly a function/process within this organization. So everyone involved in this collaborative effort has to attend to a whole other world of activity that is needed to pay the bills while we evolve this business network. These 'necessary distractions' certainly affect the pace at which we can move things along.

So when we take all these 'horse of a different color' factors into account, I believe what we see evolving is remarkably positive, qualitatively different than any other business venture I've been involved with, and while frustrating in terms of its pace, sometimes, our community is moving forward in its own time and pace.

I believe the Congress later this month will be a significant Big Bang as far as evolving this community because we'll go from a small handful of initial 'Early Adopters' to a broad-based collection of active members. Like the old saying goes, "Many hands make light work."