Craig Hubley on business protocols:
consensus mechanisms for managing a market in products or services, minally, without consideration of control or equity impact, or re-integration of longer-term experience to achieve transformation. They are less complex than the governance protocols that distribute benefits of business (e.g. the civics of the society itself).

All market protocols can uniformly price commodities for which reliable contract information is available. They emphasize exact correspondence between the information provided customers and the contract they formally agree to. But business protocols must also define non-uniform rules of settlement and dispute resolution.

Building brand equity on a reputation of fairly interpreting the shared ethical codes implicit in the contracts is the measure of success of any business protocol [eg] effective fraud detection and prevention. Unlike governance protocols, business is built on institutionalized barriers to equity, with founding investors receiving the most benefit, other founders receiving somewhat less, and those who join while the company is private sharing in the benefits to a far greater degree than those who join later, or who are merely associated with the business.

The social capital or trust between founders is preserved at all costs, until the business matures, and it becomes more important to systematically remove barriers to growth. An organization's internal civics must be minimally controlling, e.g. as per the individual examples of the master managers of the 20th century.

Progress in business protocols can be measured as the decreasing use of time and minimal encounter of doubt, e.g. every employee feeling free to act to satisfy a customer.

Good business assumes that relations are strictly voluntary; No force should be visible from within a business protocol: in fact it is a major focus of corporate governance to prudently avoid any wrong-doing or violation of customers' or society's ethical codes that would result in force transactions. E.g. respecting the price of life defined in the society at large.

Bad business protocols invite financial mutually assured destruction of all partners by engaging in unethical transactions: relying on unsustainable supply or labor relations which are considered to invite infinite regret in one or more of the societies in which the business protocol operates.

-- Anonymous, March 21, 2000