Good 8 minute talk on the open enterprise.
You see this emerging to a more or lesser extent at an increasing number of organizations (which may be a threat to some of the staff).
Key points:
- we live in democracies, but we work in (hierarchical) dictatorships
- [our past stands in the way of our future – side note]
- open source community have figured out a way to work freely, without managers
- they figured out to have several thousand people working on billions of lines of code creating billions of dollars of amazing software that run 60% of the internet without a single person telling someone else what to do
- they have figured out to be fully alive in something that they are passioned about and scale and actually produce value
- so, why don’t we take the same principles of the open source software world and apply it to the conventional work place
- it’s called the open enterprise
- first principle: there is no fixed structure, there are no prescribed leaders, no job titles, everybody has the same job title
- there is a holarchy, where people move up and down in a hierarchy depending on the situation
- WL Gore (Goretex) 9000 employees, only one job title: associate (and you own part of the company)
- there are leaders, and if there are, they have voted them into that position [and they have accepted the accountability and responsibility]
- you can take that vote away immediately which makes you accountable to actually put some real leaders in place
- the second principle of an open enterprise is transparency, everything: salaries, financial information. every meeting has an open door. if you show up in a meeting than you belong in that meeting
- zappos, groupon are making employee culture the most important thing and they are kicking but doing it
- third principle is that an open enterprise has is that they have a true meritocracy [governed by those who deserve to] of ideas. what that means is that every idea is judged on the idea itself, not who the idea came from.
- the ideas get voted on and the good ones bubble up and get implemented.