1789 - Beyond Revolution

30/03/2021

Competitive advantage does not come from size. Nor through speed. But by the attitude of the organization to create new ideas and scale them into the market. In the end, every company has a choice. It can be a follower, it can be an innovator, or it can be out of business.

There is no 1 perfect blueprint to follow. Just going onwards. Join our mission.

26/03/2021

“To be useful, a statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous.” J.D.

The best ideas always seem a bit weird and unconventional. For us as a research company, our focus lies on governance and company models. We believe that radical change starts from challenging the status quo: incentive systems, budgets, reporting lines, etc.

Our approach is creating organizational experiments based on scientific methods. This enables companies transform themselves into high performing organizations in a way that allows the employees to be fully involved, empowered and have time to adjust with changes.

It all starts by taking the first step! Join our mission.

23/03/2021

3 questions to CEOs:

1. Is your organization reacting to the environment or actively shaping it?
2. How are decision power and resources allocated in the value chain of the entire organization?
3. Do you dare to look into the governance structures for bottle necks?

Sometimes it is worth to take a step back and reflect on where your organization is standing (and heading towards) : deconstructing your current company design and environment and envisioning how it could be designed as "Network/Platform/Ecosystem" = this small step can be a breeding ground for revolutionary ideas for the future design, speed and innovation of your company.

Ain't no better time for that than now...!

17/03/2021

"Let people self-regulate!"

Last highlight from our Corporate Therapy podcast with Michele Zanini, the co-author of the management book Humanocracy in discussion with Mary-Jane and Human.

Cliffhanger questions before you dive into the whole podcast:

- Do you even need a a compliance function?
- How does peer reviews work?
- From Operational roles to Architectural roles?

1789 Community — are you on the same page? Or having doubts? Let us know!

Go listen the entire podcast on www.corporate-therapy.com

15/03/2021

“Even at the time we wrote it, we weren’t doing it. It was part ambition, part approximation. People have really struggled to copy something that didn’t really exist.”
—Joakim Sundén, agile coach at Spotify 2011–2017

Our team's five cents:

1. Autonomy is not everyone does what they want; its being both responsible and accountable for specific value creation.
2. Autonomy needs teams that can focus and know who else to work with - reduced cognitive load by defining interaction between teams and choosing team goals wisely.
3. "Do this instead - just kidding, there are no quick fixes".

We cannot recommend enought for a Monday evening read.

Community, please jump into comment section for your thoughts on this - too good to pass up!

“The Spotify model” got a bunch of companies talking like Taylor Swift about startup culture, but four former Spotify employees reveal the truth: its eponymous way of working failed before it scaled.

12/03/2021

"... leaders must remember that people don’t fear change so much as they fear the unknown, so employees need clarity and specificity from leaders, not sugarcoated enthusiasm. "

Every now and then it is good to come back to the buzzword-like words as "engagement" and "resilience", especially when the research brings relevant insights to our fragile world's organization's current situation. Marcus Buckingham and his colleagues conducted a superb research at the ADP Research Institute's with 26 000 participants worldwide.

Reversing the findings into questions, here are our highlights:

- Do you trust your team and leaders?
- Is it better to be in the "unknowns", OR be part if a change, thus becoming more engaged and resilient?
- Have you felt that resilience and engagement levels rise with your role?

Link to the article: https://lnkd.in/ePuF3eY

Always curious to know our community's thoughts!

10/03/2021

"Don't look at the snapshot, look at the evolution."

Another highlight from our Corporate Therapy podcast with an extraordinary guest Michele Zanini, the co-author of the management book Humanocracy, in discussion with our dream-team duo Mary-Jane and Human.

Questions they pondered on:

- What is the value proposition to people letting go of ?
- How did Haier get to the level of success with their innovative business model of autonomous, network-like, entrepreneurial micro-entreprises?
- What's the needed attitude to change in the example of Haier?

1789 Community — what did you guys think of this podcast episode? Let us know!

Go listen the entire podcast on www.corporate-therapy.com

08/03/2021

“There are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinking differently from your peers. To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to be both correct and novel. You can't publish papers saying things other people already know. You need to say things no one else has realized yet.” — How to Think for Yourself by Paul Graham.

Read in full: https://lnkd.in/eQBg_2e

05/03/2021

What 1789 is on a mission to solve?

- Can companies make a shift into a high-performance network organizations that are free from any hint of old bureacuratic principles?
- Can teams operate completely self-organized with full autonomy and end-to-end ownership in large complex organizations?
- Are they courageous enough to try out new approaches that fit specifically to the companies' environments in how they do reporting, salaries, promotions, hiring, product decisions, etc?

As a reserach startup with focus on and company models, we approach these questions through — organizational . This allows us and our partner companies to do incremental and evolutionary steps towards bigger changes without taking major bets.

Main focus: find out and validate what is best for their context, and most importantly, their people.

03/03/2021

How do you overcome the bureaucratic obstacles?

Our recent guest at Corporate Therapy podcast, Michele Zanini, the co-author of the management book Humanocracy, spoke with our team members Mary-Jane and Human about the typical barriers of change:

1. Lack of models and ambiguity: "I can't event imagine an alternative!"; "How else do I do compliance!?"; "How do I make sure that the organization doesn't get off the rails?"
2. Not understanding the costs: fighting one-sided battle; all about exploit than explore.
3. Hard to know where to begin: it is a daunting mission.
4. Question of power: the people at the top of organization...their life is great, so why to change?

What's your opinion on this?

Go listen the entire podcast on www.corporate-therapy.com

01/03/2021

"...front-line perspectives often generate promising process improvements and business opportunities that would not have been apparent to managers."

Article from MIT Sloan Management Review by Philipp Cornelius validates a simple yet powerful insight: move closer to your customer and emphasize the importance of your front-line employees.

How would this look in a real world?

One example we like to use is Haier - the world‘s largest appliance manufacturer. Haier‘s philosophy is to be an rather than a company. Therefore, they are a network of autonomous teams with end-to-end responsibility for products, suppliers, and customers. Teams are Micro Enterprises that have their own product and loss responsibility and full accountability in their (and hence their product‘s) success. Using an internal market, teams negotiate support, resources and staff among themselves, making it a very flexible, yet scalable structure.

Is it close enough to be to the ? : ) What are your thoughts?

Front-line manufacturing workers contribute more valuable ideas after they’re briefly assigned to other company sites.

24/02/2021

A snippet from our recent Corporate Therapy podcast episode with Michele Zanini, the co-author of "Humanocracy".

Michele speaks how while doing research for the book, the notion of "Bureaucracy is Bad", has been around basically since bureacuracy excisted.

He brings in an example, how leadership scholar Warren Bennis wrote/predicted in 1966 in the article "Coming end of Bureaucracy": “The conditions of our modern industrial world will bring about the death of bureaucracy.” Clearly, that is not the case.

Go listen the entire podcast on www.corporate-therapy.com