The Company Democracy Model: Creating Innovative Democratic Work Cultures for Effective Organizational Knowledge-Based Management and Leadership

Company democracy is often misunderstood in the business context as democracy is normally related to politics. In this book, the authors present a different dimension in which they focus first on employees and their work context and then give them new possibilities to understand democracy from the company floor level.

The Company Democracy Model (CDM) is an industry-wide, practical standard for knowledge management utilization under applied philosophical thinking. CDM is based on the wisdom of the ancient-Hellenic Delphic maxims, primarily on Gnothi seauton: Know thyself, Metron Ariston: Moderation is best and Miden Agan: Nothing in excess. The model is executed through a framework in which an organizational evolutionary spiral method is used for the creation of knowledge-based democratic cultures for effective organizational knowledge-based management and leadership. Through this new innovative methodology with methods, we can gain/create many ideas, insights, innovations, new products, and services to benefit the company in many ways.

The model starts from the epistemological, ontological, and metaphorical structure to facilitate the creation of a strong conceptual framework as the theoretical basis for a corporate strategy that promotes the continuous, sustainable, democratic improvement of the company based on its intellectual capital, knowledge, and innovation.

Furthermore, the model is used to facilitate the finding of analogies for the clarification of differences between and emphasizes the importance of capital-related and human-related business issues in the formation of company innovation development, profitability, productivity, performance, and added value.

The model uses this metaphorical basic structure to generate a practical framework of how to develop a strong dynamic, democratic, and co-evolutionary organizational culture inside the company to serve continuous knowledge-based business development. The result of all the described activities is to give the readers new ideas on how to develop, manage, and lead a company in a collective, modern democratic manner.

Essentially, the Company Democracy Model (CDM) can be used in companies, organizations, and different governmental bodies as a live knowledge elicitation engine in which ideas are continuously presented from all types of employees regardless of their rank. Once employees feel that there is something that can optimize the company/organization operations better, they are free to express themselves openly and democratically to the company/organization. This is an on-going process and a culture -- not a program.

Knowledge-based organizational cultures under the Company Democracy model ignite corporate innovation and corporate entrepreneurship adding to the company's competitiveness. Employees are free to present knowledge and ideas and receive the support needed to develop them furthermore. Therefore, an employee with one simple idea can end running a product line based on that idea, manage a spin-off company, or get promoted according to the success.

The model can be adopted in many ways within an organization, such as:

- Horizontal (directly across and throughout the entire organization),
- Vertically (in a selected department, division, or business sector of the organization),
- Pilot (in a selected group of people only, primarily for acquaintance or trial purposes).

The overall, gradual, tiered, or targeted adaptation of the model requires a limited commitment to financial resources, manpower, and corporate operations to generate the benefits but also to support a subsequent expansion of the model is other strategic business areas across the organization.