Could we tune capitalism to strengthen friendship bonds?

One of my fantasies when I was growing up was that I would have a posse of friends, family, neighbours and colleagues with whom I had rock solid, unbreakable bonds. I had their back, and they had mine. We would stand up for each other. Drop everything at a moments notice. Nothing could change that. There were lots of TV shows and movies that seemed to be based on that conceit, that stoked the fires of my fantasy. It hasn’t quite worked out like that for me, either in terms of quantity or quality of such bonds. A good part of that is probably my fault, based on the choices I have made, and who I am. I am both perpetrator and victim. But also, I can’t help feeling that the developed world has evolved to make it harder in general to have such bonds. An organizational behaviour professor I had at business school, the brilliant Rob Goffee, once remarked that ‘structural problems become personal problems’. Every relationship we have with our companies, our governments, our vendors and our communities tends to be very one-to-one. And often we are somehow, directly or indirectly, in competition with each other. For everything from the best parking spot to the best bonus. For example, it is not uncommon for companies to encourage their staff to behave in team-like ways, but grade them on a forced curve. Perhaps because of my fantasy, a few years ago I had the idea and wrote about companies not hiring individuals any more, but instead hiring pre-formed teams, that may have formed at university or elsewhere, and had learned to become a balanced well-performing team. Also, I remember years ago meeting a founder of an insurance company, based on the idea that if friends insured together, it would, amongst other things, reduce insurance fraud. I was excited by that innovative idea, although just this week an insurance expert colleague told me that such peer-to-peer insurance models hadn’t really panned out that well. I am not anti-capitalism. I think it largely works. And lots of other paradigms don’t. But I wonder if we couldn’t put a few more tweaks in here and there that support and encourage a good form of tribalism, of having each other’s backs. #unthink #unask #unlearn #capitalism