After Gillette: Imagining “What If”

What if every profession or career path required us to give half of our work away for free? What would the world actually look like if that were the case? Would we be a lot better off? Would it really be that difficult?

King Camp Gillette was a brilliantly conflicted figure amongst the greatest entrepreneurs in the 19th and 20th centuries. Gillette is best known for the invention of the razor, which pioneered a brilliant new model of business, “The Razor and Blades Business Model,” and “Freebie Marketing,” both strategic business tactics still in use today.

While working as a salesman for the Crown Cork and Seal Company, Gillette saw great opportunity in the design of a product that served its purpose, and then was tossed in the trash. One-time-use products that foster long-term, repeat, customers. While shaving his face one morning with a razor that lacked a strong edge, the idea to create a thin sheet of razor blade came upon Gillette, thus giving birth to the Gillette razor we have today.

Perhaps a lesser known side of Gillette is the fact that, aside from being a successful business man, he was also a utopian socialist, an entrepreneur with a strong disgust towards the competitive nature of the capitalist model that dominates North American economics. This passion inspired Gillette to be a prolific writer of books that sit between the genres of fiction and non-fiction. Gillette was an obsessive planner, writing hundreds of pages that aimed to highlight every last logistic element and business plan for his utopian vision. In his first novel, “The Human Drift,” Gillette wrote about the chaos of contemporary existence, and a prospectus for the alternative world he dreamed of building to fix it.

[slogen_shortcode_1]

Interestingly, the concerns expressed in this segment arguably raise the idea that Gillette’s writing may have served as a vision for the future of the United States of America’s current economic crisis, as brought to the forefront as of late by the Occupy Movement.

“The Human Drift,” as a text, represents an advocation of a new style of industry, and new social planning. In it, Gillette goes into intense, obsessive, details about his vision. The world of Gillette, named “The United Company,” was designed to exist in the Niagara Falls. During the time in which Gillette conceived of this alternative world, the first large electrical generating facilities at Niagara Falls, utilizing the alternating current system of Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse, were being built. Inspired by this, Gillette plans for a world powered solely by the electrical currents produced by the falls. The space itself is designed to accommodate the entire population of America at the time, with room for an expansion to include 30 million more inhabitants, a plan to allow the space to adapt as population grows in the future. As competition is the biggest enemy, in Gillette’s eye, The United Company was proposed to be designed in a way that terminated the possibility of competitive business by establishing one establishment per product. Distribution plants were planned for 100 cities across the country, with good distributed in an exact ration to the population itself. Gillette’s vision for the cities of America established the hope of eventually disintegrating all cities, drawing the population to the manufacturing center itself in order to create the only city on the North American continent. Overall, Gillette’s vision called for an extreme mechanization of our current systems—extreme efficiency that aimed to lead to result in more wealth for the society as a whole, to share equally. By the people, for the people. Of course Gillette’s vision never came into fruition, but aspects of it have appeared, perhaps without direct intention or realization, in the work of modern entrepreneurs, and business theorists.

In the Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen argues that, to truly innovate, the entrepreneur has to partner with the consumer to create a space for collaborative discovery. This relatively modern theory (dating back to the late 80s/early 90s) draws parallels to the vision of Gillette, in that it recognizes success not as the result of one individual, but instead as a collaborative effort.

[slogen_shortcode_2]

This collaborative approach to innovation that takes place between the supplier and the customer, as Christensen explains, allows for a voyage into unknown spaces, where communal exploration, dissemination, and discovery can emerge. A perspective such as this, which embraces uncertainty, and collective discovery, can benefit from the design of systems that leverage community engagement as a medium for facilitating such exploration.

Another modern example of an aspect of Gillette’s vision in action is The Public School. The Public School is a systemic art piece, and established institution, founded by Sean Dockray. What began as a seemingly simple and tongue-in-cheek concept: the idea that a public school could facilitate a crowd-sourced curriculum and open participation, evolved into a network of schools around the world. While the institution is not, itself, an “official” academic institution, it does, in fact, hold classes that the public can sign up to attend. The Public School began at the Telic Arts Exchange, another venture of Dockray, in Los Angeles, but also resides in Berlin, Brussels, Chicago, Durham, Helsinki, New York, Philadelphia, and San Juan. As a school with no curriculum, The Public School operates through an interface that creates a public space for the proposing of classes, and the subsequent signing up by those who hold interest in the subject matter. Depending on the public’s interest, the class then evolves as a venue for tangible conversation and alternative education on an infinite range of topics.

Comparing The Public School to generative art, as David Elliot noted in a 2008 Interview with Dockray, is actually quite accurate. While the resulting image of generative art can be beautiful and provocative, the piece is not actually the artwork itself, as Elliot claims, but instead the by-product of the piece, which is the code or process that generated it. While the classes themselves are interesting, it is really the system as a whole, and the facilitation of it, that is evaluated as a piece of work.

[slogen_shortcode_3]

Dockray offers up a unique perspective on facilitation, framing it as an art form that flips the corporate strategy on its head to yield interesting results. As an entrepreneurial practice, The Public School is an interesting model that provides nothing more than a space, and a framework, relying on the audience to define the rest. This take on business design begins to foster an interesting conversation around the potential for the open-source movement to be successfully applicable to the business industry, and to the practice of entrepreneurship.

While “The Human Drift” advocated Gillette’s vision for a new style of industry, and a new social planning, Gillette’s second piece, “World Corporation,” served as the prospectus for a company that would be set up to create this vision. This document, written nearly 20 years after the initial text, is written in the style of a business plan of sorts, highlighting all of the by-laws and logistics of Gillette’s imaginary enterprise, “World Corporation.” Here are some of my favorite by-laws from the text:

“World Corporation’ represents individual intelligence and force combined, centralized and intelligently directed. Individuals are OF the corporate mind, but are not THE corporate mind.”

“World Corporation’ will possess all knowledge of all men, and each individual mind will find complete expression through the great Corporate Mind.”

“World Corporation’ will have life everlasting. Individual man will live his life and pass into the great beyond; but this great Corporate Mind will live on through the ages, always absorbing and perfecting, for the utilization and benefit of all the inhabitants on earth.’”

“World Corporation’ is a storehouse of Knowledge, Industrial Wealth and Power, constantly increasing, never diminishing.”

Gillette’s vision is based around the development of a system that continues to become more efficient and evolved based around the needs of society at the time of its conception. The corporate mind, itself, is not entrepreneurial-—it does not create new, it simply takes what exists, and adapts it to improve society. In Gillette’s own words, “‘World Corporation’ is a business plan of absorption by conversion,—a simple means of transferring the world’s wealth from individual control to ownership and control by the people.”

So maybe we don’t need to house a bunch of service providers behind the Niagara Falls, but there is a lot to be said about Gillette’s vision. At the heart and soul of what Gillette believed is that the world’s wealth didn’t have to be governed by individuals, but instead made more sense as something that was controlled by the people as a whole. Of course this isn’t a big surprise, seeing as Gillette identified as a utopian socialist, but there is a lot we can learn from this type of collective mindset.

Let’s face it … a world in which all wealth is shared is a scenario that is simply unrealistic. I mean, if we can barely scratch the surface of revising healthcare in America, I don’t think we’ll ever come close to a society in which every individual shares the same earned income. That simply wouldn’t work and, quite frankly, that doesn’t make any sense. So instead of giving the oh so cliché thumbs down to capitalism, let’s run with it and ask ourselves how we can define “wealth” in a different manner. In an earlier essay that we have explored together, “Debunking the myths of pro-bono”, we examined the concept of value and learned that an exchange of financial resources is actually just one of many forms of value transfer. Wealth, like value, also has many possible definitions. One in particular that I would like to explore is “knowledge.” We often hear the phrase “a wealth of knowledge.” Perhaps there is a world in which a wealth of knowledge, as opposed to a wealth of financial resources, are capable of being shared equally by the people.

While every service provider (doctor, lawyer, hairstylist, designer …) is drastically different in regards to services provided, we leverage these people for the same thing: expertise. We turn to a service provider for their wealth of knowledge.

[slogen_shortcode_4]

This would be a world in which those who could afford to pay would pay, and those who deserved not to pay would cover the losses through other means of “wealth.” This would not be a world in which compensation is eliminated. This would not be a world in which those that deserve to pay would be let free.

This would be a world in which all who inhabit it that have a wealth of knowledge that is of value to the society as a whole, would share that knowledge for free, half of the time. This would be a world in which collaboration is at an all time high—a world in which those who cannot manage to paint a full picture for value exchange can call upon others to connect the dots.

This is a world that I don’t fully understand, but it is one that I am trying to build. It is a world I am still figuring out. Will you join me in exploring this idea? Give half of your work away for free. At least give something away for free. You’ll be amazed by the value you receive in exchange.