Our guest, Emanuele Quintarelli, has led global teams across sectors, cultures, and continents at the intersection of strategy, change, and technology, to help large complex organizations become not just more efficient but especially more humane. He believes in letting the full potential of humanity blossom through purposeful, adaptive and ecoistic organizations.
Living Room Conversations: Bringing Entrepreneurship into the Organizational Culture
Frank = Frank Eiselt (Host)
Emanuele = Emanuele Quintarelli (Guest)
FRANK: Hello, everybody! Emanuele, are you there? I think before Emanuele will join us, welcome, everybody to The Living Room Conversation episode number 16! Before I will introduce myself and our guest let’s just wrap up a little bit or introduce, short the concept of Living Room Conversations. So Living Room Conversations create a space for us to connect to explore thoughts and learnings in a relaxed and very human way to our listeners we give the opportunity to candidly eavesdrop and chime into one of the many interesting conversations around the space of Teal, Agile and the future of work. To our guests we look forward to an engaging dialogue and resonance that brings a breath of fresh air to the space we occupy having this said maybe shortly I’d be honored to be the host for today. My name is Frank, Frank Eiselt I’m co-founder of LIVESciences and LIVEforward institute and today I have the pleasure to bring Emanuele on stage! So maybe Emanuele, are you there?
EMANUELE: Yes I’m here thank you for having me!
FRANK: Yeah great! So…
EMANUELE: Okay I guess I should introduce myself briefly. My name is Emanuele Quintarelli, I spent the last 20 years working on new organizational models especially models that put human beings at their centers and I’m supporting large organizations in this transition.
FRANK: Thank you so much. We had the pleasure to talk a little bit like last week and I was really mesmerized by your sound and profound wisdom about the concepts of agility, sociocracy, holacracy, render a I mean yet we touched so many different frameworks, approaches, and what I felt really is like that I was talking to a person who is not only familiar with the- familiar with theoretical concepts but has really a lot of practical expertise. So over the course probably we’ll have a chance to go a little bit on the current situation and take a look into the future. Maybe my first question is like before we go into this vital discussion about the present and the future, how long would you think we need to go back in your past in order to get a little bit some insights where you’re coming from and on what kind of concepts you’re basing your current assumptions?
EMANUELE: I don’t think that much. Meaning that I’ve always worked, I mostly worked in huge corporations like many other people. And what I felt every morning was a lack of engagement, a lot a lack of space to express myself, a lack to make a dent in the universe and I think this is resonating with many people, with millions of people I think this is not only about organizations this is about society and human beings. So at some point after 20 years working in global consulting companies I decided that I wanted to leave what I was preaching. So I gave up you know the security, the money, the merchandise spends and I said maybe there is something I should do and start working with smaller organizations, collaborating with smaller organizations to leave this. To do this. Not just to discuss about this or write about these and this is where I spent the last, the last few years as you said in trying to practice more than just writing about some concepts that you have mentioned. Just sociography, allogracy, Teal organization and now and this is a bit the central topic of today the RenDanHeYi there is a quite an extreme direction that I think organization design is taking.
FRANK: Any example maybe about the RenDanHeYi concept in the past where you say like this will be a story which you will remember for a lifetime?
EMANUELE: I think that most if not all employees want to find themselves into the work. Into the the companies they live and usually this is not possible because of the hierarchy, because of your boss, because of company, of company culture and the RenDanHeYi if we had to mention the first concept, it’s really a very powerful way to unlock human ingenuity. Not because your manager is good, but because the human system is designed to allow everybody to become an entrepreneur and the firm to become a huge massive collection of entrepreneurial initiative.
I’ve always felt this you know call of doing something, owning something, building something with a bit of fear because at the end being responsible also means at least to me, having fear that what you’re doing may not be not be working. The RenDanHeYi builds the environment in which you can feel safe on one side but an owner on the other side. And I had never found anything like that in any other model or any other organization today in Boundaryless, the company I mean, we are doing it. So we are organized. We are a small company but we organize this way with the micro enterprises as I guess we’ll discuss in a moment.
FRANK: And how long does it go back? The RenDanHeYi a concept? Is it like a new concept like from the last one or two years or do we have to really go a decade back and if it’s like a long-term thing how do you think this was evolving over the time? Is it like the same concept as in the beginning or this that did this concept also evolve over time?
EMANUELE: So the RenDanHeYi means reducing the distance between every employee and every customer to zero. So it means really bringing ideas from the market. The fluidity, the transparency, the many to many interactions that we have in the market within the organization and it’s not new, it has been created by Haier. Haier group is the wide good appliances leader. They have 80,000 people. They are a manufacturer they started in China and in 1984. 1984 so it’s a few decades. They came up with this idea for a very simple reason they wanted to guarantee quality, they wanted to put the customer the center, they wanted to put the employee at the center not in a theoretical way but in a very pragmatical concrete operational way. So it’s not new, it started decades ago and thanks to this, Haier went from you know, a company on the brink of bankruptcy to a global leader that acquired the other companies such as Candy in Italy, such as General Electric’s Appliances in the US, Sanyo and other big brands and this is the demonstration that this is not theory. It’s a practice. And just to give you one example, in Italy, Haier, last year I guess drew 61 percent. 61. And General Electric Appliances this year made had the best results after more than 100 years. So there should be something in it right? This should be something we may explore together but this is not new, it’s only the most extreme manifestation of concepts coming from complexity applied to organizations. It’s not new, the only new fact is that we are doing it, we are not just talking about it.
FRANK: And maybe not everybody knows, in our audience is familiar with Haier? Maybe you can a little bit elaborate how many people are working for Haierand i’ve heard like that they have the concept of these micro enterprises?
EMANUELE: Yeah.
FRANK: So what about the structure of Haier, is it like a those concept for small companies only or is it also for large corporates?
EMANUELE: Maybe we can put on the first, the first of two slides. So Haier has 80,000 people. So it’s not a small organization even if what I’m going to talk about is used also by small organizations such as ourselves. It’s 80.000 people, starting in China and as you can tell from this slide, it’s not the usual organizational chart. There are no boxes and you know reporting lines and pyramids. It’s very organic. And really there are only three concepts. The first concept is the micro enterprise. 80,000 people no longer as a monolith but as thousands of small entrepreneurial autonomous teams actually small enterprises. That’s the idea of a microenterprise. And microenterprise has a distinct profit and loss meaning that they can decide how much money they want to spend, they can decide of course how to make money, they can decide how to share money among themselves, they can decide the direction their strategy and they can decide also the people they want to have, the people they want to hire. So it’s like really a small company with a very large level of autonomy within a big corporation. Why micro enterprises? Because we want to infuse ownership and entrepreneurship in the firm. This is something most corporations are struggling with. We want companies to be nobody, we want people to be engaged and motivated and we know this is not happening why? Because we don’t have the freedom, we don’t have the autonomy, we don’t have the space and the support to be entrepreneurs. So the first concept is from 80,000 people to 4,000 small companies, micro enterprises.
The second concept is this idea of rebundling, reconnecting the micro enterprises without the hierarchy. So let’s say that we want to to create a service for our customers in which we have a fridge but we also have components, but we also have ingredients, but we also have
somebody delivering the food, somebody in cooking the food for you. And we want to bring all of these into a single experience. Something for which our customers will pay a premium price that’s the concept of an EMC. An ecosystem micro community. It’s a bundle, it’s a collaboration
between many small teams, many micro enterprises. Now of course collaboration exists also in traditional organizations where is the difference? The difference that in this case there is no manager. There is no hierarchy. The ecosystem micro community is a contract. So it’s an agreement a peer-to-peer agreement in which the different teams, the one doing the fridge, the one doing the oven, the chefs, the producers, the distributors enter freely. And in agreement in which they decide what kind of services they are going to give and what kind of percentage of the profitsm the value generated they’re going to get back. It’s peer-to-peer, it’s flat and it’s emergent. So you have a way to fragment the firm and you have a way to reconnect the
different pieces of the firm.
The third concept are the platforms. Platforms are a way to to support these other teams micro
enterprises and EMCs to do what they do. And there are two types of platforms the first one is industry platforms. Industry platforms are a bit a way to open up the strategy to the entire firm.
In a traditional organization there is a boss, there is a CEO, there is a board that will call the shots. ‘This year we’re going there, we’re going to spend 1 billion on this’ and everybody else can just agree and say okay I will do that I will support your strategy. The industry platform are big directions such as internet of food very broad, big investments in this space that the micro enterprises and the EMC can take- so they can take the money, to do what they want to do in total freedom. So it’s just a direction, the strategy basically is co-created by having these directions and seeing if micro enterprises want to to do work, to get the money and do work in that direction or not. The shared service platforms instead are exactly like the others microenterprises but are about support services. Think about HR, IT, Finance. Even these teams become entrepreneurial. Meaning that they are fragmented in small teams and they have to convince their colleagues about the quality of the service they provide, the value for money of the service they provide. So as a recap and that’s it really 80,000 people, 4,000 small teams that are really made of entrepreneurs, of owners, technically speaking, they eventually become owners of the firm, not employees that self-organized, that self-coordinate that became
the wide good appliance leader and they’re buying companies in different industries in different
parts of the world with 62,000 companies. Also Fortune 500 companies are studying right now this approach and experimenting with it. Let me pause here because I think there is a lot to still discuss and digest.
FRANK: I mean, I feel like this sounds too good to be true right? If I think about all these concepts but before we continue, let me just again welcome everybody on Youtube live, LinkedIn live, and Facebook live. And please do not hesitate to put your questions in the chat right so we are here to answer your questions so feel free and I will just collect some of the questions during the next five minutes maybe and then we can go into one of the Q&A sessions there. Before we continue maybe one question for me, so I see the point in many models and also maybe Haier is one of the cases where on the green field you can implement such a thing without hierarchy and so on. What do you think, is this concept also a possible approach for existing companies? To transform from a traditional organization into I call it like, a network organization of all these micro enterprises? Or do you think like yeah, this is only if you found a new company and if you just build up the structures from the scratch. What do you think is it possible to transform also to such a thing or..?
EMANUELE: I know it’s possible because I’m helping large organizations to do it right now as we speak. We are working with one of the largest European banks with 80,000 people different countries, you know different businesses, different cultures, even levels of maturity and they’re going through these. They’ve been going through this now for a bit. I’ve been working with the energy leader in Thailand you know energy not necessarily the the most progressive maybe space and still they are experimenting with this and there are many examples in in every part of the world, we have examples in Italy, we have example in Japan in which Fujitsu has been experimenting with the RenDanHeYi and we have examples in Europe in which Bosch is experimenting again coming from an Agile perspective in the in this case. And then there is General Electrics Appliances and then there is candyuver and then there are many other other players and that even small companies of 50 people or 80 people, make is another example in the professional services and I have other examples from communication agencies, in which they reassemble themselves into these small autonomous teams and the company is acting more as an incubator if you want. Creating as this node and would say the enabling constraints.
To make other flourish instead of telling others what to do and trying to predict and to forecast,
empowering others to venture, to create value and to share this value eco systemically.
And an important point of this model is that it’s porous. Boundaryless is an example of an EMC of this collaboration with another micro enterprise in Haier. We are not part of Haier, we are a different company. Still we are connected by this contract in which we work together and we share value together. So this goes beyond even the boundary of the company and really
it’s a way to tap into the huge potential of collaboration and network as you said that is now available globally.
And my last point here is why? Why are we doing this? Because if you look at the some of the
most successful companies in the world; think about Amazon, think about Google, think about Uber. All of them are- have stopped or have never sold products. What they are doing is acting like platforms; they are creating a space in which millions or at least thousands of players are coming together. So they are enablers. And if you want to play this game in the market you want to less a platform to tap into ecosystems then you have to bring the same ideas into the company that’s what the RenDanHeYi is. A way to to mirror what you want to see in the market
in the organization design. And now we have proof there are a number of reasons Conway’s law Ashby’s law. Demonstrating that this is the only way. Why Spotify can do this? Spotify you know is the poster child of agility with squads, with tribes, with guilds but what nobody is talking about is that this is possible because their product, Spotify the platform is based on microservices so the product has the same characteristics is made by modules, by small parts that interact with each other through interfaces. So you have the product what you sell what you bring to the market there is a mirroring a way to mirror what you have in the organization design. The same is happening for the RenDanHeYi. If you want to be a platform, if you want to enable the success of many to many interactions well, you have to bring this many to many interactions internally, reducing the bureaucracy we have suffered from for the last 100 years and that bureaucracy that makes Monday morning so sad for so many people.
FRANK: Wow, that’s a lot. Thank you so much for sharing. Maybe if I’m just summering up so you were talking a lot about the organizational concept right how you structure the company and if i relate it now to our topic bring entrepreneurship into the organizational culture I just wonder if I see like the enterprise as the organizational structure element and entrepreneurship more as a thing of a mindset, so how would you start the transformation would you first go with some kind of restructuring like from a hierarchical organization to a such network organization and then let the people adapt to the system? Or would you rather go for the people to say like first we
need to build up this entrepreneurial mindset in order to have a successful organizational transformation? Is it like one or the other way or how would we blend these two approaches?
EMANUELE: It’s a bit of a chicken egg problem I guess. But let me clarify this, yes it’s about the mindset. You are basically inviting employees to act as entrepreneurs and to become owners
so we are talking about organizational culture right? And you are talking about some traits that people may or may not expose. But, and this is the difference, I believe what the RenDanHeYi does is to infuse all of these structurally speaking into the design of the organization. There are millions of organizations that want to be more innovative, want to be more entrepreneurial as their employees to be engaged, energized to have great ideas but that in their daily life and in their organizational design do their best to kill energy and entrepreneurship. What Haier does is baking these into the structural core of the organization so if you want to work in Haier especially Haier China, that’s the only way. Just to give you an example; your salary. Your salary at the end of the month this month not in three years is paid by the customer outcomes you generate. So if this month your migratory price is not doing good, you will only receive a basic income. If your my enterprise is doing great, you are doing great because you are getting the salary you are getting a profit sharing you may become an owner so you can get equity of the firm. So this is very concrete. It’s not an idea, it’s a practice. So on one side you have culture on the other side you have the design of the organization. How to transition to this? Of course in some cases you have somebody like Zhang Ruimin, the former CEO and now the chairman of Haier that came up with this vision, you know, big vision, long-term energy, decades of transformation. Let’s be frank, in most cases you don’t have a Zhang Ruimin so you don’t have this luxury and when we say okay let’s stop here there is nothing to do but instead we are seeing thousands of organizations not copying the RenDanHeYi no nobody wants to copy and paste this is not possible you cannot copy and paste culture, you cannot copy and paste something that has been developed in decades in China. Let’s say taking inspiration from it so
how to take inspiration from it at Boundaryless, we believe that the process for taking inspiration from it should be resonating with the outcome. So if you want to be Agile in the most pure sense
so I’m not referring to Agile principles here. If you want to be entrepreneurial you need a process that is Agile and the entrepreneurial. So it’s a process of inviting your colleagues to experiment to have pilots, to learn, and to scale what is working and to kill what is not working so it’s itself an innovation process. And what you do as a the owner, as the CEO, as the board
is only creating the enabling constraints so creating the conditions to which this may gradually happen then it may take three decades or three months. I have examples on both extremes depending on the size, and the culture, on the country but still it’s an iterative, emergent, non-linear process inspired to complexity more than a top-down transformation based on a three years long ghant. So there is no target operating model, there is no way to exactly predict how many microenterprise you are going to have in three or six months it’s about having faith you know, in a human system and again creating the conditions for this human system with some you know strategies of course to flourish.
It’s like what Zhang Ruimin says is that ‘we care about the forest, not the tree’ so what you want to do is to have the conditions for a rainforest to drive even if the single tree may not thrive. So the micro enterprises will fail it’s fine it’s innovation, it’s experimentation but the forest should survive, should be, you know, sustainable, and should be resilient.
FRANK: Okay, thank you. The first questions are coming in and maybe stick to them tougher of the tree in the forest I think this question might fit quite well so the question is what practices do you recommend to avoid competition and transform competitive energy into a synergistic one to allow each micro team are pushing boundaries to put their entrepreneurial game on? So if you think like this micro enterprise as a tree and you mentioned the bigger forest how do you relate it to competition?
EMANUELE: So competition and maybe this is a discontinuity, this is a difference between the RenDanHeYi, Haier and many other examples that we have. Competition is seen as a positive force in the system. So microenterprises can compete. You may have two micro enterprises selling a similar product to the same customer, this is accepted. But ecosystem micro communities are collaborative so you’re balancing competition with cooperation in a competitive model. And again there is no centralized coordination mechanism so you cannot there is nobody telling two micro enterprises you shouldn’t do this, you shouldn’t compete with them you should behave right? This is something that the system doesn’t have. You have freedom so you have microenterprises that will change the direction, change your offering based on the results on the market feedback. The EMCs have been created recently all in 2019 so this collaboration has been created only in 2019 because one micro enterprise felt the need to standardize let’s say this collaboration. So it came out from the system itself because they have received a need for collaboration in order to address more complex customer scenarios. So they realize that to follow the experience you need more players and you need a way to orchestrate the value that the different players can can bring. So at the same time you have competition and collaboration and why competition?
Let me stress this because most of our organizations today are too bureaucratic. You ask something and you have the answer after six months and the example of Fujitsu here is is telling why they discovered the RenDanHeYi and this is a story they told so it’s public. Because at some point Fujitsu is providing professional services into the IT space. Think about cloud and digital something like that. At some point one customer of theirs asked for one professional. So they wanted one consultant. The guy that talked with the customer went back to the firm, asked for the right people, went through approvals, talked to IT, and after six months went back to the to the guest and said ‘oh I have the guy for you!’ and the customer told them ‘well I got the resource the following day.’ they lost this opportunity and probably they lost the customer because it took them six months to do something, at the end very simple. Why? Because of bureaucracy. Because of company too slow approvals managerial levels let’s say processes.
In six months Haier created a unicorn. So created the micro enterprise that went from zero to one billion dollars when they realized that said okay maybe there is something wrong, there is something we have to improve and this is happening every day.
FRANK: Now it really starts to be too good to be true so let’s take an example, so you are working in the washing machine micro enterprise and I’m part of the dryers right?
EMANUELE: Yeah.
FRANK: And now I have an idea where I say like ‘wow I could bring some of my technology into your washing machine’ to the highest extent maybe people wouldn’t need tries anymore right?
Why should I provide my technology to you when at the end maybe I don’t have any more income right? I have some kids at home and wouldn’t I be afraid to offer my technology from the dryer technology to your washing machine having in mind that maybe I don’t have a job in the future anymore?
EMANUELE: Well actually you will have more work to do and actually you reap more benefit from the work that you’re already doing. So in this case you will probably raise your hand and say ‘I feel there is a need in the market that I cannot satisfy without you so let’s build an ecosystem microcommunity’ let’s write a contract in which we represent this user scenario in which we can wash, we can dry, maybe we can even bring you know, a provider replacing our clothes with new ones every six months and maybe we may have something with products that are going to improve the quality of our washing machines and so on. So you are going to have an ecosystem of different players in reaching the experience for the consumer that will become unique. So something that nobody can copy in the market, probably the consumer will pay more for this experience, not having to look for different providers you know to buy and manage different machines, to find a guy to repair them, not having to think about all these small things. Somebody is taking care of that. So we are selling something that is bigger, there is more long term we are going not just to have a transactional relationship with the consumer once in every 5-10 years but every week, or every month. And you’re going to sell more of your technology, let’s say, thanks to the collaboration with me. I’m happy, you’re happy and the customer of course is happy. That’s the strategy. Going from products, product brands or even premium brands to worse scenario and ecosystemic brands. that’s what Haier is doing regarding less of the organizational design but you need an organizational design to do that.
FRANK: Sure. So I got it. So when I’m the I don’t know, gifted engineer with a lot of ideas right? So I don’t think in product anymore but I reach out to some people to elaborate on a use case where together we have more. So really the zero distance with the customer and then we come up with the idea so like this is better for both teams right? Both micro enterprises but let’s think like this is five years right? That washing machines have technology to replace dryers and become a new unicorn in the market. How would it look at short term, say like okay I have a contract in place, so in case there is this desire on the market everybody is more happy and gaining more money and so on. On short term, is it still? So what do you think like maybe maybe as an open question are there any challenges you have discovered like in this sense? I mean I’m now constructing stuff but is there something like where you say okay these are the the typical obstacles when you go into this competitive synergistic approach with your distance to the customer, what is it?
EMANUELE: So first of all this is not long-term, or not only long-term and ecosystem micro community contract as points, reflection points so you are stating what is going to happen in three months, in six months, in nine months, in twelve months so this is basically now it’s not you know it’s not so far in the future so it’s very concrete. But for sure there are challenges. Not every employee wants to be an entrepreneur or even an owner. Just to give you an example, in Haier there is no work allocation function. So there is nobody allocating you and telling you next week you are going to work on this microenterprise it’s individuals going and finding a job there is an online platform everything is an online platform in which if I have a microenterprise I will post the jobs, I will post open positions and the colleagues can decide if they have the capabilities and the interest to join my microenterprise. The same for these collaborations between microenterprises. So it’s entirely the individual or the small team that decides what they want to do. That means that individuals must be proactive, must be open to risk, must be entrepreneurial, must be self-driven, must be able to also understand customers, understand the business, understand the market. This is something that many of us probably are not used to. And some of us are not interested into. You’re becoming what Zhang Ruimin says is we want every employee to be is or around CEO. And that’s true so you have plenty of pressure if you want and if your microenterprise is no longer working the microenterprise will be stopped. And you will go back on the basic universal income that you have by law in China, not in Europe but after a few months, you will need to find the other work, otherwise you will be invited to leave the company. So there is pressure. It’s not free. You have freedom, you have rewards but you are if not technically speaking, at least culturally speaking an entrepreneur.
FRANK: I got it. And maybe let’s think about the bigger forest scene right, so there was one comment there let’s not get more clothes closes every month for sustainability’s sake so how about to put it like the washing machine drying sample in like in an even bigger picture and when I think like okay the concept is fine you can have a lot of profit you will be successful in a money-wise sense, how does all this these concepts of RenDanHeYi and Haier relate to climate change and sustainability or the bigger forest right? So are there any people caring about a common purpose to change the world or whatever?
EMANUELE: So again there are some responsibilities in Haier. Not many but some. That are not decentralized yet this is one of them so if you think about purpose, if you think also about culture this is something that Zhang Ruimin, the board and some pieces of the organization they have a culture platform. And they have a Haier research model institute so they have people on one side setting the values, the direction, the expected behaviors, talking about these, sharing their stories, circulating best practices in the firm. And Zhang Ruimin talks a lot about purpose about being a good citizen, about having businesses, doing good for society for the world not just for employees or for shareholders. So definitely this is something they care about. Still I would say maybe this is cultural. I don’t know that in Haier you can feel lots of pressure on performance you know delivering on your leading targets as they as they called them so there is pressure. But just keep in mind that this is not a cookie cutter it’s not something you should or could copy. And why I’m saying that Zappos, you know Zappos is a company in the US is a company very known very well known for their values the delivering happiness, the wow effect through customer service. And thoroughly independently from Haier they went along the same trajectory they used allegrancy to fragment the organization. And they use the something they call market-based dynamics to re-bundle the organization with teams that expose services and
collaborate. Exactly like Haier, totally independently from Haier, in a culture that has been in this case created by Tony Hsieh, that unfortunately passed out. That is made by caring for customers, you know caring for the city Las Vegas, same implementation. What’s the only difference that I can share is that the way in which they measure the value is on one side profit, of course, but there are other two indicators – one about employees, and one about customers. So you have this three-pronged approach that they call the triangle of accountability and somebody make calls the trinity right? In which yes you are profitable, extremely profitable company, but you can care for the world, customers but also suppliers but also you know institutions, the environment and you can care for employees as well with the same approach. It’s only the metric and of course the culture that you have behind it and we go back to the title of this session so you need yes entrepreneurship but probably you also need the right organizational culture and this is not a mechanic it’s something softer deeper at the values level
if you want to make a dent in the universe not just in terms of the money but also in terms of the impact and doing good that you want to generate.
FRANK: Thank you so much. Before we go maybe to your organizational map I’m really curious
about this one maybe just pick up one more question which you can just answer shortly in one minute? So the question is like we have a very small home-based company but of course we hope to grow. Should we start now to create an adaptive organization or wait until we are bigger and more successful?
EMANUELE: So first of all it’s ‘eco-istic’ not ‘egoistic’ and just no, it’s just important, thanks Kate. It’s important because we want to look at the ecosystem at the forest and this is very difficult, to be sincere. Because we have we are used to do the opposite to think about ourselves so Boundaryless make and others are demonstrating that you can do this
with 10 people, with 15 people and we are seeing the early examples of no profits using the same approach. So every time you have different products or different ventures that have a common culture, common values that would benefit from a layer of common services well the
RenDanHeYi is very powerful. You don’t need to have 80,000 people if you want to infuse responsibility, accountability, ownership and you want to energize your people in pursuing
different directions at the same time, I think the RenDanHeYi is a good way and again today we’re talking a lot about RenDanHeYi. But in Boundaryless, we are mixing the RenDanHeYi with sociocracy. That is a totally different beast. 150 years old coming from quakers, looking for transparency, for purpose, for equivalence and making decisions by consent. We are mixing these two. so again the RenDanHeYi is not the solution to all the problems of the world, it’s you know, a very successful manifestation of some possibilities but each and every organization should take ownership about tweaking it, tailoring it, mixing it, maybe with Teal maybe, with sociocracy, maybe with Agile if you want to do scrums and stand-ups and retrospectives,
you have a responsibility for these and definitely and we can go maybe we can show the map-
FRANK: I mean- let me offer my question to you right? I mean you’re familiar with so many frameworks and so many stories but when I just asked you as Emanuele right? What would be your perfect mix? You can say like this is the favorite if you would maybe take over a company of 40,000 people and I mean for sure it depends on the culture and then you cannot copy paste but what really excites you? Where’s your passion? And what would be- is your favorite blend of different models do you have something in mind there?
EMANUELE: Yeah let’s say of course there are- those two models I’m investing my time in and I can tell the story so I didn’t start from sociocracy. I start from- I started from holacracy and even if holacracy, Brian Roberts may not agree but I believe has taken 90 percent from sociocracy. So it’s apparently very similar. The mindset, the beliefs, the values behind it are very different than those of sociocracy. Sociocracy is really about the group, it’s really about the circle. The responsibility is in the circle, it’s not into an individual. Holacracy has very powerful individuals.
So I really like the sociocratic work and word because they have this concept of consent. So there is a way there is efficient but inclusive of deciding together that most companies, small or big miss. So you can decide together but you can decide quickly. That’s one component. Something I would like to see in all the organizations of the world in any industry in any size. What the RenDanHeYi brings and that’s the second one I will keep is the entrepreneurial soul. So unlocking the ingenuity in our own life, we buy houses, we sign you know, mortgages, we have loans, we marry, we do very different and difficult things. And in organizations we are not
trusted to spend 50 dollars? You see the difference? So you know, I want to have that freedom and responsibility on one side but probably we also need to find ways to stay together, to collaborate, to decide together. And they may not necessarily come from the RenDanHeYi. The RenDanHeYi doesn’t tell anything about what is happening into the team. The micro enterprise is a black box. If you want to use Agile into a micro enterprise and you want to do stand-ups
you can do it. The RenDanHeYi doesn’t enter into- the microenterprise is like a company. So you have your company you can do it as long as you respect your commitments. So you have plenty of freedom to introduce sociocracy and Agile into it. So I think the future would be about a combination of ideas under the unique culture and DNA and also you know, the kind of purpose that the organization wants to to have so unfortunately there is no easy and standard way to do to do this for myself sociocracy and the RenDanHeYi are now two complementary but very interesting starting points.
FRANK: Wow. That was a lot. We’re coming also, closely to our end. So I thought sometimes I’m inspirational but listening to you I just heard so many inspirations, and so many different stories. Thank you so much for sharing just maybe at the end I would give you the opportunity to a little bit advertised what you are burning for I think you have the 3EO company?
EMANUELE: Yeah.
FRANK: Maybe some sites from yourself, to use the stage to promote something.
EMANUELE: Yeah, I don’t want to promote too much. What I’m saying is that most of what we do, quite everything, to be sincere, is open source. So for example we do 3EO conversations and 3EO stands for entrepreneurial, ecosystem, enabling, organization so it’s an abstraction
of the RenDanHeYi meant to facilitate learning and adoption from other companies. So it’s a way to simplify a bit all of this and to make it more accessible from other firms. So we have these conversations in which we talk with you know, with some of the pioneers into the space. We had conversation with Morningstar, we had conversations with Buurtzorg, or with Fujitsu so many of the things that we are discussing can be found into our conversations. If you look at the EEEO conversations you will find it. Sorry I cannot- I think I cannot write in the chat I don’t know why. But that’s one. Another thing that we have is publishing a toolkit. So a series of canvases
to let others do this without us so you don’t need to call us, if you want to do this. You can just use our guides, use our toolkits, use our conversations tool to play with that. And finally of course you find all of this on our site and there is the new one is ‘www.boundaryless.com’ with the ‘y’ ‘dot IO’ [www.boundaryless.com.io] So that’s where you will find that you can download it, you can join our trainings, our community, our toolkits and hopefully participate to these. So we
really believe in co-learning and co-building all of this so that’s my invitation.
FRANK: So open source for sure. And I just think we could continue for hours now but the best things have to come to an end as well. So thanks again for sharing. And I mean you’re also on LinkedIn right? Probably I think everybody has the address so if there’s anything that touched your heart, or your mind, or your soul or your hands whatever, feel free to reach out to either us or Emanuele. And I want to also use the time to promote our next Living Room Conversation and give you a chance to follow us on social media I think we have some slides we can plant
in. Yeah, so the next one is on January 5th. The Living Room Conversation with Tom van der Lubbe from Viisi. I personally heard his story, really exciting, completely different from what Emanuele talked to us today but similar again in this in a sense. And then we have Semco Style Institute Agile Culture Essentials, January 27th and February 3rd, 10th, 7th. So just use the QR code there and please follow us from whatever platform you are following us. And yeah, I think that’s mainly it or maybe you want to share something, something really personal. So what would be your what do you wish for christmas or for the next year to happen?
EMANUELE: My wish is to see, especially this moment in history, so when we are struggling with COVID-19, and we have unfortunately people dying, people losing their jobs, a shift into our organizations, and a shift in our life; I think if not now, when? So that’s my wish. I think we don’t design organizations we have a responsibility of making the world a better place, one organization at a time. So I hope that people listening to us, joining us will do something
so please do something. Have a role into this this journey that we are all making together
and thank you so much for having me.
FRANK: Namaste. Yeah. Thank you also!
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