Corporate rebels

Sometimes a book comes to you at exactly the right time. Yesterday I found a book on my desk that was a book like that. The book is called Corporate Rebels and is written by Joost Minnaar and Pim de Morree. I read it cover to cover in one evening. It is an almost exact manifestation of my thinking of the past year. Such a feast of recognition. In it, I found most of the principles that should be the foundation of the organization of the future if you ask me:

• Focus on making the world better with your organization, profits will follow. From the higher purpose, practical goals follow.
• Trust people.
• Stimulate entrepreneurship: it is the key to innovation. Combine freedom and responsibility.
• Decentralize decisions, flip the pyramid upside down. Leadership means supporting others, not telling them what to do. Co-create decisions.
• Equality. All people are equal. No hierarchy in the sense of authority and control. No status symbols. No titles. No power play.
• Be transparent. This leads to trust, clarity, equality, engagement and personal safety. Hold peer reviews. Share everything. Be radically transparent if you dare. Make sure every question can be asked. Create psychological safety.
• Experiment and measure if it works. This makes your organization more agile.
• Promote making mistakes but also make sure you are learning from them.

The most used way of organizing a business that is built on these values seems to be a network of self organizing business units. We are using structures that come from a world that no longer exists. We need to change things up if we want to thrive in this century.

The authors of this book talked to a bucket list of more than a hundred inspiring organizations to find an answer to the question how effective leadership can be done differently because they were themselves frustrated by the traditional ways. I had the same frustration that made me think about the same question. These past months, I have been grappling with some ideas about the organization of the future. The itch I needed to scratch about what was wrong with the organizations we work in and how we could do better started a little over a year ago.

My own rebel journey

Maybe it all started when I was invited to be a field expert at the faculty of Industrial Design at the Technical University of Delft to be interviewed by students for the course with the name Cutting Edge Design, Innovation and Entrepreneurship in which I found a new definition of entrepreneurship:

Entrepreneurship, the missing link between design and innovation

Soon after that, I did a leadership training called Servant Leadership:

Servant leadership: connecting the spiritual to design leadership

This is all about leadership as a service and not a right or title or top down or anything like that. I was dabbling with a new idea about leadership that was not hierarchical:

Beyond the non-hierarchical leadership model

I saw that leadership was the biggest limiting factor:

Leadership as the limiting factor in innovation

Then I was thinking about how meetings can be better:

Good meetings are as few meetings as possible

I made a little side step into an essay exploring how rebels can function best:

Practical cookbook for radicals

After that, I ventured into thoughts about how empathy, seeing and systems thinking are crucial skills:

What it takes to design a strategy

Power play was the next topic that caught my interest:

The opposite of the 48 Laws Of Power is where we need to go

After that, I went into a period of reflecting on my experiences with psychological safety:

The two sides of psychological safety

I found my main driver in unleashing potential in other people:

Design thinking is all about empowerment and unleashing potential

I tried to find some inspiration in design thinking by thinking about organizations as something that needs to be designed for a purpose:

Design thinking as a model for the organization of the future

And after a short return to the idea of psychological safety,

Psychological safety, power and inclusivity

I came to a simple inversion to shift the thinking about organizations:

The least we can do is turn the org chart upside down

The Corporate Rebels book gave me the perspective that all these essays al circle around the same question: how should the organization of the future look like when the goal is to create a more human, empowering, equal, safe, creative organization that is able to deal with the changed environment of the 21st century? It also showed me that the people experimenting with new ways of organizing are rebels: people who have the ability to think beyond that what is, that question the foundations, and have the courage to execute on their ideas. They stand up. They stick their necks out. Not for themselves but to find a way to make our organizations more human for all of us. They are the pathfinders. The authors call it more fun, I call it more human. Check out these guys if you want to know more about them:

Make work more fun | Corporate Rebels

Thank you for taking the time to read this article. I hope you enjoyed it. If you clap for this essay, I will know I connected with you. I will dive deeper into the topics around Design Leadership in upcoming articles. If you follow me here on Medium, you will see them pop up on your Medium homepage. You can also subscribe to an email service here on Medium which will drop new essays right into your inbox. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn to see new articles in your timeline or talk to my bot at dennishambeukers.com :) You can also find me on Instagram. When I am not blogging about Design Leadership, I work as a design strategist and project manager at Zuiderlicht.