Paper by Charles Handy on the merit of federalist principles applied in businesses and other organizations. Handy begins the article discussing how companies are creating leaner, more integrated, and global networks, and how this is essentially the incorporation of federalism’s principles to make a difference in business organizations. Handy proceeds to explain that organizations today are increasingly seen as minisocieties rather than impersonal, bureaucratized assemblies, with major companies in every country moving in the same federalist direction. He then explains that federalism is not just a fancier word for restructuring in a company, arguing that the principles of federalism, and the very idea of it, reach into the soul of an organization, making it a way of life rather than a business framework or political system. Handy notes, however, that it is the structure that changes first, which grants a series of paradoxes to federalism's operation, the first being that paradoxes need to be both large and small at once. He states that this paradox of both bigness and smallness in organizations dominates politics and business today, and that federalism balances pressure among those in the center of an organization, those in the centers of expertise, and those in the center of operating businesses, with the true centers of federal organizations dispersed throughout the operations. Being so arranged, these centers exist to coordinate, not to control. Handy identifies business’s second paradox as its declared preference for free and open markets as the best guarantee of efficiency. However, he notes that open markets, operating on their own, do not necessarily work any better than central planning, arguing that a bit of both is needed, a fusion embodied by the federal compromise. Handy then designates the desire to run a business as if it were one’s own when one cannot afford, or may not want, to make it one’s own, as the third paradox, observing that it is cheaper and safer to expand one’s business range by ...