One
thing that I want my readers to understand is that the future is
evolving right before our eyes because nothing is been lost anymore.
That is the greatest gift of modernism. This article needs to be
taken to heart and applied everywhere.
We
have all been brought up accepting hierarchical structures as the way
to get things done and have accepted greats gobs of natural
inefficiency in the process. It simply becomes too hard to effect
profitable changes or worse, to alter unprofitable decisions.
Thus
most retreat to protecting their pay check while the young and naive
become frustrated.
The
interesting question is whether a criminal organization can operate
just this way also. That is actually worthy of investigation. My
sense is that it would be extremely difficult simply because such an
organization needs a body of folks to act as the front and that can
only be sustained by misinformation and someone(s) lying.
It
certainly sets up a far more ethical paradigm.
Enterprise
Without Bosses: An Interview with Paul Green, Jr.
FEBRUARY 21, 2013 by THE FREEMAN
Paul
Green, Jr., is a “colleague” at the Morning Star Self-Management
Institute, a Sacremento-based group devoted to helping organizations
transition to a radical new management paradigm.
Of
Morning Star, management guru Gary Hamel said, “They have control,
and discipline, and focus, and accountability. But they
do it on a peer-to-peer basis without having this kind of a
bureaucratic class of overseers.” In short, they have no bosses.
The
Freeman:
No bosses?
Green:
That’s right; no bosses.
The
Freeman:
What’s that all about?
Green:
In a nutshell, self-management means that each colleague is
principally responsible for each of the functions of management with
respect to his mission. They plan and organize their work with
respect to their mission and their fellow colleagues. It’s their
responsibility—and success, or failure, rests with them.
The
Freeman:
Readers may notice that in our description above, you’re referred
to as a “colleague,” just as an entry-level truck driver is
referred to as a “colleague.” And yet you’re an award-winning
expert who probably receives executive-level compensation. How do you
explain this?
Green:
At Morning Star, there are no titles; there’s no structural
hierarchy. Each colleague comes into the enterprise with the same set
of rights as any other colleague. Each colleague commits to a
Personal Commercial Mission when they come aboard and, further,
commits to what we call “Total Responsibility”—essentially,
they agree that they are totally responsible for the success of the
entire enterprise.
The
Freeman:
That sounds pretty heavy.
Green:
We’ve always felt that if people embrace this idea that they are
personally responsible for the entire enterprise, they’re more
likely to perform at a higher level (and, quite honestly, are most
likely to find fulfillment in their career). The
thing is, you can’t really expect people to truly embrace “Total
Responsibility” unless they have the freedom to act—which means
that everyone has the same authority in the enterprise with regards
to acquiring resources (spending money), acquiring talent, and
causing change. If the authority level is the same, then there’s no
real meaning to titles and artificial hierarchy.
The
Freeman:
Some might call self-management “intra-organizational anarchy.”
Is it? And how did self-management come to be implemented at Morning
Star?
Green:
I guess it depends on the way you use the word "anarchy." I
guess it is anarchy in the sense that there’s no structural chain
of command or hierarchy—no “government” of sorts. But it would
be a mistake to assume that it’s disordered or without structure.
On the contrary, it’s very ordered, and there is structure. The
difference is in how we arrive at order and structure. It’s not
through some sort of centralized command-and-control hierarchy;
it’s a group of individuals developing order through a social
network of sorts—perhaps you could call it “spontaneous
order”—based
on circumstances and needs.
Chris
Rufer, our founder and owner, envisioned self-management early on in
his career, and when he built his first processing facility, laid out
his organizational vision to the first small group of colleagues he
hired. Many of the systems that we use to enable self-management at
Morning Star we’ve developed as we’ve grown, but our way of doing
things is, and always has been, Chris’s vision. In fact, on
our website we
have a vision statement that, at least in part, speaks directly to
self-management as central to what we are trying to do as an
enterprise.
The
Freeman:
Our readers will be interested to hear about the two Colleague
Principles of self-management. What are they?
Green:
Our Colleague Principles are heavily influenced by a principle that
basically states: to
the degree people do all that they agree to do, and don’t initiate
force against others or their property, happiness and prosperity will
emerge.
The
Freeman:
Sounds familiar.
Green:
This really influences our organizational philosophy: we have a
stated philosophy that says that people perform best when they’re
happy, and they’re happiest when they have control over what’s
important to them. We believe that most people find circumstances
surrounding their job important, and that they should have control
over those things. That goes for both the resources they need to
achieve their mission, to the way they choose to go about achieving
that mission, all the way to their personal development—their
career. We believe people should control those things, and shouldn’t
be subjected to some random other person—a boss—controlling those
things on their behalf.
Another
example is our Colleague Letter of Understanding, our CLOU. It’s a
contract of sorts that each colleague makes, where they craft their
own role in the form of commitments to their fellow colleagues. It’s
a subtle distinction, perhaps, but at Morning Star you make
commitments, you aren’t assigned a job.
The
Freeman:
For most people, self-management may seem impossible. Even for
libertarians, the idea of no management hierarchy within a firm might
seem insane. But it not only works, it’s allowed you to do well.
How well?
Green:
We’re a private company, so we’re a little stingy with details,
but we’ve grown from just an idea to become the largest processor
of tomatoes in the world. We’re vertically integrated, with a large
trucking company, farming company, harvesting and transplanting
operations, and a pretty extensive distribution operation. Our
revenues have grown to over $700 million, and our production has
grown at a consistent clip, year-over-year, since we’ve been in
business. And we’ve supported our growth with our own returns—our
founder and owner has never sold off equity to finance our growth.
The
Freeman:
If you’re doing so well and others begin to adopt self-management
and become successful, we may start to see a chain reaction of sorts.
Do you think this could have not only a transformational effect on
business, but on society? (And if so, what would that transformation
look like?)
Green:
There’s no question in my mind that self-management would have a
transformational effect on society. Our organization, at its core, is
about individual freedom and personal responsibility. People
recognize immediately that success will come only as a result of what
you do: you are generally unimpeded by bureaucracy or stifling
regulation that might keep you from whatever measure of success that
you want to achieve, but neither is there a “paint-by-numbers”
map that shows you the way to success. It all flows out of your
drive, commitment, hard work, and ingenuity.
And—surprise—we’ve
found that that kind of success, the kind that is unquestionably the
result of your blood, sweat and tears, is incredibly invigorating.
Our colleagues fall in love with it, and embrace it almost
universally. And, anecdotally, I see that it affects the way they
live their daily lives outside of work—their relationships with
others in the community, friends, families, and other businesses. But
it also affects the way they vote. Think about it: once you’ve had
a taste of the thrill that comes with building something yourself,
it’s hard to get excited about someone who tells you they are going
to “grant you prosperity” by giving you something; those promises
don’t excite you very much. Our folks tend to become incredibly
responsible as individuals, they covet their freedoms and have
proven, over and over again, that once they have a taste of the
benefits of our way of doing things, they are stubbornly unwilling to
trade freedom for any sort of safety net or benefit that purports to
make their lives better.
The
Freeman:
People might be confused about the idea that at your company there
are no bosses, but there are “authorities.” Can you unpack this
distinction?
Green:
There are authorities in every facet of our lives—and that’s a
good thing. When I need my appendix removed, I want the world’s
foremost authority doing it, if possible. The question is, how does
one gain authority? It can either come from a title—that is, handed
down as some sort of structural set of rights—or it can come from
one’s peers as a result of performance. We believe that true
authority is the accumulated esteem of your individual colleagues. We
believe that we’re stronger if the only way to gain authority
within the organization is by providing excellent service to your
colleagues, and for them to individually acknowledge you as an
authority.
It’s
definitely more efficient to issue a decree (in the form of a job
title) that anoints me an authority, but can you imagine how
frustrating it would be if that were the way the world worked outside
of our jobs? Imagine if your choice of doctors when it came time to
have your appendix removed was made based upon some sort of formal
“hierarchy” of appendix doctors that was appointed by the
government?
So
there is authority—but it’s what we call informal and dynamic.
It’s given to a person by his colleagues as a matter of individual
choice. And those colleagues can take that authority away as quickly
as they gave it if the authority fails to live up to the expectations
of their colleagues—just as you have a choice, in a free market, to
seek out an alternative supplier if your current supplier fails you.
The
Freeman:
If self-management involves tying an employee’s personal commercial
missions to the performance of themselves and the profit-centers
within the firm, what can non-profits do by analogy?
Green:
Interestingly enough, while we are a for-profit enterprise, and while
we measure profitability as a key high-level measure of the degree to
which we achieve our mission, we don’t obsess about profitability.
We do have these micro business units that we’re working to build
robust profit and loss statements (P&Ls) for, but even those P&Ls
are simply one of a handful of indicators of performance.
I
think the critical thing for any enterprise—for-profit or
not-for-profit—is to develop a robust mission for the enterprise,
and personal commercial missions for each colleague within the
enterprise. Those personal commercial missions—essentially mission
statements specific to individual colleagues—should, collectively,
roll up to the overall mission of the enterprise. From there, you can
develop what we call Steppingstones—measures of process
performance. Most of our Steppingstones are not profit related; they
are measures of the individual processes that each colleague has
committed to.
Any
organization, with a little work, can be defined in terms of missions
and processes measurable in terms of Steppingstones—irrespective of
the legal structure of the enterprise. In fact, our thought has
always been that profit, as a measurement of performance, is not
really actionable, and as a guide for action, isn’t really the most
critical measurement. Profit will result from excellence in
performance if we perfect our processes as measured by
Steppingstones—but you can’t directly affect that profit.
The
Freeman:
Paul, It’s been a pleasure.
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