WRITTEN ON April 4th, 2008 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Design: Co-creation, Foundation of Trust, What do we want?, Wibbipedia/MindtheGap

Check this out from Alan Mitchell’s “right side up” buyer-centric commerce forum:

The individual as a business

There is a simple question at the heart of person-centric commerce: whose profitability are we trying to improve? In our current organisation-centric world, there is only one answer to this question: the organisation. But now there is another answer: the individual.

Today, big businesses employ armies of advisors, consultants and agents to help them achieve their goals and act on their behalf. They reward these advisors, consultants and agents to the extent and degree that they help the business achieve what it wants to achieve: improved performance, increased profitability etc.

Right Side Up businesses and services bring the same approach to individuals. Individuals pay them to help them achieve their goals more efficiently and more effectively and to act on their behalf – to help them improve their performance and increase their profitability *.

This talk about ‘personal profitability’ is not just metaphorical, it’s literal too. The Right Side Up service addresses each individual as a legitimate business in its own right, because it recognises that individuals do all the things businesses do.

* Of course, one of the big differences between big organisations and individuals is that individuals define ‘performance’ and ‘profitability’ in many different ways. ‘Profit’ may be emotional rather than financial, for example.

Like any business, the individual:

* sets strategies to achieve goal, sources inputs, processes them into outputs or desired outcomes etc.

* has to manage many different departments or functions: my home, my health, my money, my transport, my communications etc. Naturally, the individual wants to run these departments better.

* manages many processes to do this: set goals, make plans, set priorities, make decisions, conduct exchanges and transactions, do work, coordinate activities, oversee logistics, administer things, keep records, and so on.

* invests assets such as time, money, energy and attention in managing these departments and processes – and naturally seeks the best possible return on these investments.

Right Side Up services bring professional expertise and specially designed infrastructure to help individuals improve their performance and profitability on all these fronts. Organisations that view and treat individuals as customers of their particular organisation, buying particular products and services, simply cannot ‘see’ this potential.

That’s a fantastic statement of the sort of “corrective” thinking we need to apply to Transformational Government to make it work and to make public services that are respectful of human dignity.