I'm working up a five-year plan and will provide details here.

This includes many "employee" (C.E.O.) benefits and training being planned for.

• We have to plan carefully for success and keep service and delivery speed at a set target.
• As I am a huge fan of systemic planning and analysis of our assumptions (mental models), you will see some diagrams as I get going.
• Please feel free to ask for the data I'm using to support any of these projections (open inquiry), and also feel free to advocate your own solutions.

Practice is required!

• Practicing how to maintain the balance of advocacy and inquiry are key to our being a successful learning organization!
• Practicing how to do dialogue versus discussion are key to our examination of assumptions we may hold - dialogue being an open sharing of one's assumptions with others and an opportunity to examine and explore the evidence supporting such assumptions, or discover the weaknesses that these assumptions may be imposing upon our ability to grow beyond our assumed roles, actions, and behaviors and into previously unexplored territories.
  • Dialogue also patches "politically" based assumptions concerning how others view our roles, and allow us to explain how we are projecting assumptions concerning other people's roles within the company, and our ability to heal communication barriers which may exist.
• To have dialogue, three things are required:
  • That all assumptions are "suspended" and the participents are willing to hold them up for examination, stating their assumptions openly and the evidence they have used in the past to support (or "prove") these assumptions to be true.
  • That all participents truly feel they are equal colleagues, doing this to reach goals commonly shared by everyone involved - a "collegial" spirit of unity and solidarity towards a common successful outcome.
  • That a type of moderator, called a facilitator, monitors the activities of the discourse and controls whether things veer away from dialogue and into discussion. Such a person may ask, for instance in the case where such veering into discussion does occur, whether the group is willing to agree that at this juncture they should move into discussion about a particular subject that has been brought up to be discussed. IF the group wishes to stay in dialogue mode, the discussion topic will be noted and postponed to take place at a later time.
    • Discussion differs from Dialogue in an important way - in a discussion, there are winners and losers - one side is vying against another side in an effort to prove that the view they are holding is the truest or the most productive one. Discussion is an important tool, and is essential for the decision making process. Dialogue, on the other hand, is an exploration of many possibilities and of the assumptions we may be holding that are holding us back from seeing a larger perspective, better possibilities, or new approaches.
• Training and non-threatening practice sessions will be scheduled so that we all can become fluent and comfortable with dialogue, and with balancing advocacy and inquiry in our discussions.

Our Approach to Intellectual Properties and Compensation

• In a traditional company, anything that can be copywritten or patented becomes the sole property of the company. The person working for such an organization signs an "Intellectual Property Release Form" which gives away all future rights to exploit their creations outside of the confines of the company they work for. In our organization, signing of a "Inellectual Property Release Form" will also take place, but with a major difference! For starters, as works so well in the music business, the publisher (our company) and the author will own a fifty-fifty share of the copyright or patent together, so the creator never loses part ownership of their creations as occurs with traditional companies. The legal guidelines for freeing up use of these intellectual properties for future uses and applications in various situations have been well established in the entertainment industry, and will be exploited in a manner benefitting the author's or creator's here.
• Also, as long as a person's "copywritable" or "patentable" creations are being used and are making money for the company, that person will receive what is called in the insurance industry residual compensation, meaning that they will be paid some percentage of the sale of every item containing their creation for as long as it is being sold. This means, for instance, that if one were to write a short poem for a greeting card, as long as that greeting card OR the poem in different greeting cards were being sold, the author would recieve residual compensation - a kind of commission - even if they are no longer with the company, having retired or moved on to other things. This arrangement will be part of the "release contract" signed by each employee, and makes our company's handling of such 'intellectual properties' entirely more enlightened and absolutely fairer to the creators of our products. So, if that greeting card poem was used and sold for one hundred years by us, the residuals would continue, even in perpetuity after the author's death as part of their estate. I view this as the fairest handling of such matters imaginable - but if you imagine an even fairer doctrine, please write something about it to us all here!
• Additionally, if the creator of an 'intellectual property' requested a release of this property for use by other venders - even if they are competition to us - the release would be assigned (as a licensing agreement in most cases) as long as our company was permitted to continue using the requested 'intellectual property' in existing or future products, unless special circumstances required us to suspend use by ourselves, perhaps as part of a stricter licensing agreement, or due to an acquisition from our company of our entire fifty percent share of the copyright by another entity (for a negotiated price). If our company continues using the material as part of our product line, however, the residuals agreement will hold, even if a competitor is producing a product containing the same intellectual property.
  • To give an example, say you wrote a short poem for a greeting card that became as popular as Robert Frost's "The Road Less Travelled", and another company approached the author desiring to use it also in its own greeting card line. This arrangement would be allowed, as a conditional release or license to use the material, either for a negotiated amount of up-front payment, or as a residual agreement, or sometimes with no financial strings attached at all. If they wished to have exclusive use of the poem, however, they would have to negotiate for the publisher's rights (that is what they call the part of the copyright owned by the publisher, or our company in this case) and strike an agreement with the author/creator of the poem. If they wished to buy the poem outright and have complete ownership of the copyright, they would have to negotiate with both the publisher (our company) and the author to purchase the entire copyright, as in our arrangement, both the creator and our company would be part owners of the copyright. This would be a bad idea for the author in my opinion, because usually a "buyout" is a one-time cash purchase, and there are no residuals or royalty arrangements in the typical deal - though that may be something that the author (or both the author and publisher) could have negotiated into the buyout contract. If this sounds complicated, it is! But only in that it forces the author and the company to make some hard decisions about the future use of their mutually owned intellectual properties.

(Can you tell? Mr. Britton used to be a copyright consultant providing free services to musicians and composers, assisting them in their contractual agreements with record companies and publishers as well!)