Break the bylaws, go to hell
Few people today would regard corporate governance to be particularly exciting. Necessary, boring, occasionally hard, but dangerous? Nahhhhh.
But it wasn't always that way. Over the past thousand or so years countless people lost their lives as a consequence of documents we now call corporate articles and bylaws. Religious wars, the rise of the nation state, even our modern sense of personal identity flow out of a corporate revolution.
Ground zero for the past millennium is arguably the 910 C.E. Foundation Charter of the Abbey of Cluny in France. In some ways the document is pretty mundane--"every five years, moreover, the aforesaid monks shall pay to the church of the apostles at Rome ten shillings to supply them with lights"--but amidst all the Latin legal language there's a revolution in the works.
The Cluny monastery changed the world by creating what was in effect a centrally governed transnational corporation distinct from local bishops and feudal landowners. Click the link below for a couple key passages:
And let the monks themselves, together with all the aforesaid possessions, be under the power and dominion of the abbot Berno, who, as long as he shall live, shall preside over them regularly according to his knowledge and ability. But after his death, those same monks shall have power and permission to elect any one of their order whom they please as abbot and rector, following the will of God and the rule promulgated by St. Benedict-in such wise that neither by the intervention of our own or of any other power may they be impeded from making a purely canonical election.
It has pleased us also to insert in this document that, from this day, those same monks there congregated shall be subject neither to our yoke, nor to that of our relatives, nor to the sway of the royal might, nor to that of any earthly power. And, through God and all his saints, and by the awful day of judgment, I warn and abjure that no one of the secular princes, no count, no bishop whatever, not the pontiff of the aforesaid Roman see, shall invade the property of these servants of God, or alienate it, or diminish it, or exchange it, or give it as a benefice to any one, or constitute any prelate over them against their will.
Now we're used to the concept of an autonomous entity with centralized management and an indefinite life, but back then--not so much! Check out how the Charter deals with people who try to violate its terms:
. . . let him incur the wrath of almighty God; and let God remove him from the land of the living and wipe out his name from the book of life, and let his portion be with those who said to the Lord God: Depart from us; and with Dathan and Abiron whom the earth opening its jaws swallowed up, and hell absorbed whill still alive, let him incur everlasting damnation.
And being made a companion of Judas, let him be kept thrust down their with eternal tortures, and, let it seem to human eyes that he pass through the present world with impunity, let him experience in his own body, indeed, the torments of future damnation, sharing the double disaster with Heliodorus and Antiochus, of whom one being coerced with a sharp blow scarcely escaped alive; and the other, struck down by the divine will, his members putrefying and swarming with vermin, perished most miserably.
As effective a deterrent as this might be, I don't recommend inserting this provision in your own organization's articles and bylaws.
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