Thanks for the additional details on WorldBlu, Traci, and thanks for joining the conversation.

Thanks for the blog post and mention. As you may have seen on our website, two representatives from Point B spoke at the last WorldBlu Live conference in 2005 held in Washington, DC. And yes, they do seem to be a model of organizational democracy. They were not on this year’s WorldBlu List because they did not apply due to other awards that they were applying for this past year instead. Hopefully they will apply in the future.

I’m most interested in your assertion, however, as to why the companies on the WorldBlu List aren’t democratic — what makes you say that? What evidence do you have? What is your definition of democracy?

In order for the organizations to make the WorldBlu List of Most Democratic Workplaces they have to be practicing the ten principles that create a democratic system on three levels — a leadership level, an individual level and a systems and processes level. You can view the full list of principles by clicking here http://worldblu.com/scorecard/question2.php and more about the criteria by clicking here http://worldblu.com/scorecard/question1.php.

Employees in the organization complete a survey to determine if the organization is democratic, a survey that was developed based on a decade of research into what makes a democratic organization. It’s a very high bar and as far as I know no other organization has developed such a comprehensive standard for identifying democratic workplaces.

I hope this helps to clarify.

BTW — Thanks Jon for the apology and your blog post.

So, I owe her an apology and this is as good a place as any to offer it. I apologize for any discomfort that relating my story / experience may have caused, and I intend to offer ato WordBlu a guest blog post about how wirearchy and organizational democracy are related or have aligned interests.

Yes, Harold .. the blogosphere is (still) a great way to make transparency work towards positive outcomes

BTW, you have the distinction of making the 2000th comment on this blog.

I am also a bit wary of WorldBlu … the founder (Traci) asked me to write a guest blog post about how organizational democracy and wirearchy are related, about a year ago. I wrote several, edited the final draft several times to be shorter and less controversial (at Traci’s request), had promises that it would be posted (April and May 2007), and there has been no blogging activity, etc. since last April.

I dislike doing free work that is then ignored … it devalues the work and demonstrates a basic lack of respect. How hard is it to publish a blog post ?