No worry about attrition, office politics, poaching pains and a life without HR pests. No pain of having to accommodate independent directors (that adds no value to the business) in your board, just because the law demands. Since you make it all yourself, you don’t have to spend time correcting others’ mistakes.

I see the only hitch could be commerce. When there’s a one man board, there’s no need for a board meeting. Who will meet who? But most commercial transactions, say, opening a current account, calls for a Board “Resolution”. When there are no discussions, debates or disputes, what is there to be *resolved*?

Yet another is corporate status. A company is an artificial person created by law, has perpetual existence, can sue and can be sued against. This is precisely why Banks and other lending institutions are comfortable in lending to a company than a sole proprietorship or a partnership firm, where the proprietor or partner(s) are personally liable and the entities have no separate identity other than that of its proprietor or partner(s). In other words, directors are insulated against the liabilities of the company even though they have collectively decided at their meeting to its uptake and the shareholders have a limited liability too, only to the extent of sums unpaid, if any, on the face value of the shares subscribed by them.

In a OMC, this whole edifice comes a cropper. The stakeholders’ (Lenders, creditors, customers, agents, franchisees) comforts don’t exist. If the one man dies, the only throat to choke is gone.

Now the question is, how long can you go solo…?

Although the scale issues may vary considerably across a tenable software business (the early examples here are of services, where the customer creates the content, whereas the argument later is about software business models, which are more complex and need to be more scalable), I especially like the analogy of the zero-distortion amplifier, although I would say that Radiohead’s strategy would work in the brand universe for only those brands, whose signal-to-noise ratio is very high. So it may work for established brands such as Radiohead and Madonna but not for the newbies.

Specific to the music industry, it is plain old dis-intermediation and then re-intermediation at work where the least value adding entities (record labels) are being shoved aside. With recording artists such as Justin Timberlake and Jay-Z turning recording creatives and recording infrastructure providers rolled in one, new models are in process of being developed.

An earlier post of mine here:
http://laviequotidienne.wordpress.com/2007/10/02/record-companies-are-dead-long-live-the-musician/

An investor perspective here:
http://global-themes.com/content-now-officially-free/

However the emergent software models are still about picks-and-shovels based monetisation, whereas the customer is increasingly platform-agnostic and end-game-oriented. So much as a hierarchy of innovation does not clearly exist, I think the innovation space is ripe for parametrisation and better definition.

I notice there are some digressions but that is what happens with a post which sets off ideas

Thanks.