Welcome to the latest issue of Decent Tuesdays, a new, experimental edition of The Main Street Journal that covers and connects the many aspects of decentralization.
At Ghana’s University of Professional Studies, Accra (UPSA), Andrews Ayiku teaches his MBA students to focus on local needs and resources. Following this guidance, some of his students developed a peer-to-peer platform that pairs farmers with local motorbike riders who can bring their produce to market over the region’s uneven rural roads. Two of his alumni have created fashion brands that repurpose waste fabric cuttings into apparel and accessories that are sold by dozens of local retailers.
In today’s Governance article, Ayiku argues that such businesses should scale, not by making these specific businesses as big and generic as possible, but scale in a different sense: “empowering entrepreneurs to create solutions tailored to their specific contexts, solutions that ripple outward to transform communities.”
For this new view of entrepreneurial scale, Ayiku cites a podcast interview with Alejandro Crawford that’s pegged to Crawford and Miriam Plavin-Masterman’s upcoming book One Size Fits None: Time for an Entrepreneurial Revolution. In the interview, Crawford argues that investors were so captivated by the success of things like Facebook that they now try to make other things scale the way software can. For example, they’re buying out small farms to create global industrialized food systems and taking over local hospitals to standardize their care, even though these consolidations don’t serve people well and they’d pay for something better if it were available.
Crawford argues that in the real world, trying to anticipate everyone’s needs and address them all with one unified system will inevitably fail. The people at corporate headquarters, and the software they deploy, don’t have eyes, ears, minds, hands, and hearts on the ground, so they won’t see the most locally-responsive solutions or potential local efficiencies.
That’s why Crawford predicts a backlash against scale-obsessed entrepreneurship, which creates “cattle class” experiences of people herded by machines, and frustration with A.I. generated “junk” legal advice, education, product documentation, and other outputs. He foresees increasing demand for unmediated human interaction: “In-person will become more important over the next couple of years.”
To facilitate grassroots innovation, Crawford co-created RebelBase, a popular web-based platform for collaborative entrepreneurship. RebelBase offers an integrated set of tools and templates that guide users through the different parts of a typical entrepreneurial journey, such as identifying a problem, developing and validating solutions, building a team, and getting funding. It’s for people everywhere to create new businesses, not to create a new business for people everywhere.
Crawford discourages software thinking, but as an ex-software guy, I can’t help it. I appreciate that he calls RebelBase a platform, not an app. Apps (like Facebook) constrain users to do specific things, and are ripe for old-style scaling. But platforms empower software developers to create any new apps that they want to, which is an open-ended process, just like empowering entrepreneurs to create new businesses.
To take the analogy further, apps and platforms run on a multilayered stack of infrastructure that extends down to underlying physical things, like hardware servers and routers. But human entrepreneurs need other physical resources to succeed, such as food, water, shelter, health, education, community, safety, and freedom. So, to maximize local efficiency, we also need to scale these things as part of a complete platform for human innovation.
Also, Crawford’s “scaling” distinction reminds me of the two main types of scaling used for app instances (copies of server-side apps that run in datacenters and talk to the client-side apps that you install on your devices). You can scale app instances vertically or horizontally, which means making each app instance bigger (more CPU, more memory, etc.) vs. creating more of them. So let’s hear it for scaling entrepreneurship horizontally by empowering more local innovators.
But the lesson from app instance scaling is that people use both types, vertical and horizontal, to maximize efficiency. They constantly re-balance the two in different proportions based on the specific app and its current demand. This suggests that, as in many domains, a great way to navigate fractally-complex and ever-changing reality is to have two approaches that pull in opposite directions—such as global vs. local–and constantly reassess their applicability and combination against the current situation. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
With this in mind, I appreciate Team Global, and let’s never stop arguing, but given the current status of things, I’m pulling for Team Local.
Photo Credit: The Odell family, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
NEWS
FOOD
How City-Owned Grocery Stores Can Tackle Food Insecurity, CounterPunch (August 8)
Government-owned grocery stores, as proposed by Zohran Mamdani to eliminate food deserts, are not a new idea, and other examples can be models. Kansas and North Dakota have state- and city-owned grocery stores, Atlanta will be opening two, and the U.S. military's long-established network of stores has lower prices than commercial supermarkets.
City food forests offer a chance to experience nature — and eat it, The Washington Post (August 19)
In several cities, communities are converting public land, vacant lots, and other unused space into food forests, which are like community gardens but with food-bearing trees and shrubs that are native or otherwise grow easily in the local ecosystem. Residents enjoy them and they benefit wildlife and the environment, but they require sustained attention to maintain.
ENERGY
How Solar States Is Leading The Way For A Green Collar Economy, B the Change (August 13)
Founders of regional solar installer Solar States discuss their B-Corp journey, hiring and training "green collar" employees in urban Philadelphia, fine-tuning transparency by letting employees see each others' pay ranges rather than exact salaries, and moving the 15 year-old company towards full employee ownership in the future.
MAKING
In St. Louis, Artist Housing Opens Up Homeownership Opportunities, Shelterforce (August 8)
Growing up in St. Louis, mural artist and D.J. Stan Chisholm always had to move as his mother found different jobs. In 2021, he was able to buy a two-story brick home as an artist, through the St. Louis Art Place Initiative, a nonprofit that rehabilitates vacant city properties for occupancy by creative professionals including painters, dancers, hairdressers, architects, and chefs.
FINANCE
Investing in Nature-Based Solutions, LIFT Economy (August 6)
Jonas Philanthropies will fund: native Winnimem salmon habitat and economy in California, circular sanitation and composting in Haiti, watershed restoration in Arizona, refugees working in permaculture in Uganda, a community reforestation org in Uganda, reforesting native cloud-forest trees in Hawai‘i, and establishing a center for regenerative agriculture in Haiti.
GOVERNANCE
Scaling Local Solutions, What if Instead? (July 31)
Ghanan business school graduates are succeeding by focusing on local opportunities, like fashion designer Loretta Ata Tetteh, who developed a system for gathering and recycling waste fabric into gowns and workwear. Their place-based innovation exemplifies the kind of entrepreneurship that fits the future, as argued in an upcoming book discussed above.
To unsubscribe from Decent Tuesdays emails, click your profile at the top right, select Manage Subscription, and deselect Decent Tuesdays.
love every message in this article, @Paul. Bravo