Companies of Happy Owners

7 min readJun 16, 2015

Creating the Company of the Future — Part 2

In my last article, I outlined why IU is on a mission to invent the company of the future. Over the last 10 years, we’ve tried and tested all manner of things in service of this quest — some things have stuck, others have been spectacular failures. It’s a journey that’s still underway and so there is no ‘final answer’. But, what we can do is explain the current iteration and why we (currently!) believe in it.

There are three things that make IU what it is and which someone would need to understand to make sense of us. These are:

We place happiness at the heart of IU and as a result have set up the entire organisation around balancing short term pleasure with long-term fulfilment;
Our collective purpose is that “We Make Revolutions Happen”;
And, as a result, we believe the company of the future has to be built around three major pillars: Collective Ownership; a different Value Model; and a radical Operating Model (we call ours IUocracy).

In this article, I’m going to cover points 1 and 2 and the Collective Ownership and IU Value model pillars. IUocracy is a big subject in itself and I’ll cover this in a future article.

We place happiness at the heart of IU

Why?
Because that’s what life is about and, since we’re convinced that there is no such thing as work / life balance*, an individual’s happiness at work is vital.
*Note: We don’t believe that people should divide their lives into “Work — the bit I dislike or endure” and “Life — the fun bit” and then try and balance these two things. You spend an enormous amount of time at work (if you’re lucky) and life is short — so the idea that you would happily allocate so much of your precious time doing something you actively dislike is anathema to us. We’d rather find the things that we like doing and that we’re good at and which can earn us the money we want and then spend a sensible amount of our time on these.

Because happy people are scientifically proven to be more successful and we want IU and every person in it to be successful.

Because we believe that we are at an inflection point in history and that a move away from the Industrial Age both drives and facilitates a fundamental shift in how we perceive, conceive and execute commerce, working practices and the relationship between a company and an individual and that it’s now time to put happiness (rather than greed) at the heart of all of this.
For more on this read our article here.

IU is set up, structured and organised to be both purposeful and pleasurable

Why?
Because long term, sustainable happiness is shown to be driven by purpose (having meaningful experiences over the long term) and pleasure (experiences that are enjoyable in the short term).

Because maximising happiness comes from keeping these two elements in balance over time and by effectively allocating one’s attention to those experiences which give one both purpose and pleasure.
Note: There is a broad body of science behind this thinking. For the basics, I suggest you read “Happiness By Design” by Prof. Paul Dolan. And if you’re interested in diving into more of the detail then this reading list by Shaun Achor is a good starting point.

Our collective purpose is to make revolutions happen

We do this in two ways (i.e. there are two types of ‘experience’ at IU):
A) Our products
Where we help other organisations (of all shapes, types and sizes) to generate disruptive growth through our Provocative Opportunity, Revolution Blueprint and Get Momentum products.

B) IU is revolution #1
Where we relentlessly seek to define what the company of the future looks like when it has happiness at the heart of it (i.e. where purpose and pleasure at both maximised and balanced).

And, because purpose is such a big driver of happiness, we recruit for people who are motivated by this collective purpose. Some people can see a direct link between “Making Revolutions Happen” and their own personal purpose (if they’ve figured it out). Others are just motivated by it right now. We’ve learned the hard way that it just does not make for much happiness if we don’t recruit for both alignment with purpose (in our case the idea that you like change and creating it) and culture (that you believe in the roughly the same things and ways of working that the rest of us do).

So, we are a company obsessed by the radical change going on in the world around us and how this offers opportunities to challenge any and all orthodoxies to create better systems, processes, products, services, organisations etc.

As a result, IU is organised around three big intersecting and interconnected building blocks

Collective Ownership — the idea that everyone at a company should own it and bear the fruits and responsibilities that come with this
The IU Value Model — where we redefine where and how value is created within a company and how this value is redistributed between the company and an an individual working for it
IUocracy — our own operating model which seeks to make sense of how a company should operate in the Digital (rather than Industrial) Age.

Collective Ownership.

WHY?
a) Because as an owner you have genuine purpose and you will always know *why* we are doing something (because you are ‘all in’ and invested in the long term outcomes for IU as a business);

b) Because as an owner you have the ability to influence *how* IU does stuff and therefore the collective pleasure we derive from being at IU;

c) Because as an owner you have more freedom than an employee and science shows that ‘self determination’ is a key driver of both purpose (doing meaningful things) and pleasure (enjoying what you are doing and how you are doing it);

d) Because as an owner, unlike an employee, you are able to reap the rewards of any long term IU success in full proportion to your overall contribution to that success;

e) Because, in the end, we believe that a model of collective ownership is more likely to lead to collective happiness than the more traditional model of ‘few owners-many employees’.
(Collective ownership is wonderful in many ways but it also comes with a series of corresponding responsibilities, behaviours, accountabilities and compromises which all owners must sign up to — these are set out in the the co-owner contract which everyone has to sign and which we’ll publish or write another article on soon).

The IU Value Model.

What is this made up of and why these elements?

I) IU values more than money because we value happiness the most:

money isn’t everything and science shows that happiness is driven much more by feeling fulfilled and purposeful than having great wads of cash (indeed there’s plenty of research that seems to indicate that overall happiness doesn’t increase once you get above $75k annual income);
so we really value *learning* as much as money;
no one is saying money is unimportant but you don’t come to IU for just the money, you come because the whole thing means you will constantly be challenged and there will constantly be opportunities to learn and try new things;
we get at least as much fulfilment and meaning (purpose) from learning new stuff as we do from an exit for one of our ventures;
and because we value pleasure as well as purpose, we sometimes forgo work because it won’t make us happy despite the fact that it might make us lots of money;
you could say that we are in it as much for the journey as for the end destination.

II) As a result, we value our people differently from most companies:

there are no job titles or fixed hierarchy to hold you back;
there are no promotions but remuneration is worked out at least partly on your contribution and also on how much new stuff you’re learning and adding to your “talent locker”;
we like and value “stacked people” (you can read more about this here);

III) And we run a very different business model

our company is constantly pivoting and adapting to the ever-changing world therefore we “make and sell” very different things over time;
we take risks as owners and entrepreneurs because it lets us learn new stuff and because we are able and willing to take risks like forgoing some money now for perhaps more money later (unlike an employee);
we put our profits into all sorts of ventures as this lets us learn new things, try new things and because this may pay back bigger to us as owners than taking the profit now as salary for example.

So that’s our current view of two of the main mechanisms for driving happiness and success through our organisation — have a company full of owners who are passionately ‘all in’ and re-imagine what is truly valuable (alongside money) and ensure that there’s a win-win for both company and individual in how that value is created and shared.

Would they work in your organisation? If not, what would work to drive more happiness and success through your organisation?