Debit card company

I am personally excited with Amable’s journey and here comes the classic case of MONEY? Who gets how much? For me the whole concept is meditative.

Here is what Shilpi puts in his words

Our core philosophy that comes out in various forms is that we believe that every child is capable of achieving whatever he/she wants at his/her own pace. 

We wondered why we cannot extend this to grown ups. Not any grown ups. But grown ups in an organization. The conventional thought is that all of us are competing for a limited set of resources and hence it is in our benefit to get ahead of others in any which way we can. So in an organization that means that we are each vying for signing up more customers than our peers or finishing up a project quicker than our colleagues so as to eat a bigger portion of the bonus pie...often resulting in ill-will among the group.

We pondered if there is any other alternative to this compete-or-die culture.

There will be broadly two types of work at amable. Something that can be outsourced (mostly project based) - examples could be making of a DVD, supplying chairs, handing out flyers in an apartment etc.... Second is something that an amable team member is working on like creating posters, talking to parents or children for various programs, designing the website etc... First one is simple in the sense that we will work with various suppliers to get quotes & pay according to the work delivered. 

"Compensating" for the second type of work is interesting. We want to experiment with the concept of "I take as salary as much money as I feel I need" in short the ITASAMMAIFIN theory:) Or as Ratnesh puts it the ‘debit card company’. What does this mean? It means that I define my salary & take it. As simple as that! If I might need more money this month as I have a vacation in Goa planned, I just take it. Next month someone else might need an extra bit of cash for whatever reason. The point is that it is not necessarily correlated to either the results or the effort I put in. No one is measuring me on my results or effort. It is completely driven by MY needs. Very similar to what we keep preaching about how children learn:) Each of us gets a debit card & we can withdraw as much as we want/need. Obviously we can only withdraw as much as is available in the bank;) Similar to how a family operates!

Will this work? What if one person withdraws way too much? What will it do to the other team members? Wouldn't that leave them disgruntled? What if someone is too shy to ask for more? We do not have all the answers...we just have a belief. 

We do not have all the answers...we just have a belief.

A belief, a trust in each other and a yearning to learn from children - who so intuitively throw all conventional adult models to air.