Is Self-Management The Future of Work? w. Doug Kirkpatrick

Commitments are the atomic structure of life and work. Commitments are the only things that exist between human beings.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Yes And Podcast. I am your host and serial entrepreneur Bunny Young, and today we have a guest episode with a complete stranger to me, except for the stuff that we work on, and it's so similar. I cannot wait to get into this conversation because we've already had a little bit of a warm-up conversation, and while the topics are the same, I think the mindsets and the perspectives are a little bit different, and I love to be able to have that conversation. And so the topic we're going to be getting in today is a little bit around self-care, self-leadership. Self-management is what this guest talks about in those two words, and I cannot wait to introduce him to you. So without further delay, Doug Kirkpatrick, welcome.

Thank you very much, Bunny Young. Great pleasure to be here today. Thanks.

Yes, we'll see if you feel that way in the next 20 minutes after we get into these conversations.

Of course.

So first off, I want to thank you as a vegetarian for the work that you did in the like Morningstar space. Am I correct in reading all of that, that that's the company that you made it possible for me to have vegetarian food that doesn't taste like cat food?

Well, I will say this. I'm not the one that really made anything possible. I happen to be the first financial controller for a company that's called Morningstar. It's called Morningstar after the last sentence in the book Walden Pond by Henry David Thoreau. That sentence reads, the sun is but a morning star. And that was the founder's vision of beautiful, perfect results. It's a company, uh, that I joined when it started up, uh, in 1990. I was part of the core startup team, 24 people plus our founder. And, uh, his vision was to build a state-of-the-art, uh, high-tech food processing company and, uh, develop and, and produce and, and market tomato products. Since that startup, Morningstar grew from zero to become the largest tomato ingredients manufacturer, tomato processor in the entire world, with multiple factories, global sales, thousands of employees, billion-dollar company centered around making great tomato products, now the largest in the world. So So that story was kind of my business origin story, and that's where we started organizational self-management that we'll talk about today.

Yeah, I think that that's so important. So first off, congratulations, right? Like, I'm probably, hopefully, the 1,000th person that has said that. Being— going from 24 to having this massive company, that's— That is not common. That is not the usual path. And so I just want to say congratulations around that. And I also want to say, like, Business 101, especially online business, they talk so much about niche. So the fact that in the '90s, this founder was so clear that it wasn't the— it wasn't the best food processor. It wasn't the most state-of-the-art food processor. It was specifically around tomatoes. And that's so very specific. Do you think that that had a role, or what role do you think that had in ultimately the company's success? And what, what role does niche and being specific and being that targeted have in a company's success, in your opinion?

Well, playing to your strengths is always a great strategy. And so our founder, Chris Rufer, grew up in the Great Central Valley of Northern California. He was surrounded by agriculture and agribusiness his entire life. He went to UCLA to get an MBA. He was driving a tomato truck to put himself through college. And so as he drove into antiquated, decrepit factories to deliver loads of tomatoes as a college student, he would notice inefficiencies. And multiple ways in which things could be done better. And, uh, so he would be happy to hop out of his tomato truck and, and seek out, um, uh, company leaders to whom he could propose his ideas. And as it turned out, no one was very interested in what he had to say. You're just a kid. Who, who cares what your ideas are? This is how we do business. But they greatly underestimated him and his, uh, persistence and resilience. So he kept kept collecting those ideas, finally put together a business plan, uh, pulled together a group of investors and built his first factory in 1983. And that's when I met him. That's when I joined him at his first factory. And at that factory, it was also a high-tech, state-of-the-art tomato processing company. And, uh, we just began to notice things. And Chris in particular noticed that when people entered the factory to go to work, uh, he realized that every single one of those individuals was already a manager in their own personal lives. People were making gigantic life-altering decisions on their own already without a boss. They're deciding who to date, who to marry, what to do for a living, whether to go to college, whether to buy a house or a car, have children, or whatever it might be. Somehow people make these decisions without a boss. So that begs the question, if people know what to do in the workplace and how to do it, uh, why exactly do they need a human boss to tell them what to do? And so that was the germination of the idea of self-management that he carried forward, uh, when he started Morningstar in 1990.

That's so incredible because You know, coming through, obviously A Better Place, the company that I own, or one of the companies that I own, does organizational psychology. And when COVID hit in 2020, there were so many requests for trainings and workshops and all of this kind of stuff. But I almost felt like, as, as a retired therapist, like we were coming in on like the 4th or 5th floor. There wasn't really a solid foundation that's set. And so what you're saying makes so much sense in the aspect that instead of looking like— not to quote JFK, but instead of looking at like the company bringing you the training, kind of starting at the foundation of where are these really standard, simple concepts in how we control our lives and how we run our lives, how are we reinforcing those before we're adding on the things that will ultimately make us more successful at a very specific job or task. And so, how did you personally experience that? Was it coming directly from the, the conversation that you had with him and noticing that, or how did you personally experience this in your career and then apply that, um, obviously to now this advisory firm that you own?

The whole concept of Morningstar and the concepts that our founder, uh, carried forward when built Morningstar, we're very principle-centric. Uh, and that's a challenge in, in today's world, uh, in that many, if not most people, many companies, if not most companies, don't focus enough on principles.

Mm-hmm.

We have lots of policies and procedures and SOPs and all kinds of, uh, approaches to work. Uh, but how many companies really focus on principles? So our founder was very principle-centric throughout, uh, the startup days of the first company. When we started Morningstar, uh, he was very intentional. Uh, we were working about, uh, in a tiny little farmhouse, uh, on a dusty canal bank here in Northern California, uh, our core team. And we were building this factory just down the road. And one day, uh, Chris came into the farmhouse and said, let's have a meeting of colleagues and talk about how to organize. And of course everyone said, sure, of course. And so we met at night out on the construction site in a double-wide construction trailer. We sat around in a circle facing each other on folding chairs and Chris handed out a document titled the Morningstar Team Principles. And they boiled down to two things. The first principle is that people should not use force or coercion against other people. If you think about that principle, it's foundation of all law everywhere in the world. So every law against assault and battery, theft, burglary, kidnapping, murder, all the rest is predicated on the principle of not using force. The second principle is that people should keep the commitments they make to each other, which if you think about that, it's also foundational to law, especially civil and contract law, which would be meaningless if parties didn't deliver on their promises to other parties. And so we discussed and debated these two principles for a couple of hours. At the end of the evening, we just kind of looked at each other around the circle and said, we don't have any objections to these principles. They're pretty self-evident. And so we adopted them as pretty much the entire governance of the enterprise. And when we filed out of that trailer, we were a self-managed enterprise at that moment. And from there, we had— this was March of 1990. We still had a factory to build. So we had thousands of acres of tomatoes coming up out of the ground up and down the state of California. We had hundreds of contractors on the job site 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, constructing and fabricating and welding. We had to hire hundreds of people to operate the factory and drive the trucks. And we had vital equipment on ocean cargo freight, freighters out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean waiting to go through the Panama Canal., but finally, July 16th, uh, of that year, uh, we turned on the factory. We produced 90 million pounds of industrial tomato concentrate for, uh, the great, uh, ketchup manufacturers and salsa manufacturers of America. And, uh, we did it all without a single human boss. No bosses, no vice presidents, no managers, no supervisors. Just team members focused on performing great work together. And so that was the proof that we needed that we could carry forward and make this work.

Okay, so self-management as a concept in a company means there's no bosses, right?

Actually, it's the opposite. So what it means, Bunny, is that every single person is a boss of their own personal mission. And it means that the company mission statement is the boss. So there are no bosses of other people, but there are bosses. You're a boss of yourself and you're a boss. Uh, your boss is the mission of the enterprise.

That goes against a lot of society's norms, at least in the Western culture. Absolutely.

It does. Absolutely.

So I walk out of your factory. And I'm walking into a society where there's this— let's, let's just give like some of the generalizations of happy wife, happy life. Like, I do it for my kids, you know. Um, we could name 50 other ones that are just this established societal accepted hierarchy. How was that for your team to be their own boss at work, but then transition that to their lives? I imagine this impacted their families and their lives and their relationships outside of work.

Yes, I believe it did. Internalizing those two core principles is absolutely critical. It's critical in your work life, critical in your personal life., it elevates all aspects of one's life, if properly practiced. If you think about the principles, we know these are the two most fundamental principles of human interaction, because if you take the first principle, not using force, imagine a world where every single individual in the world embraced the principle of not using force. In that world, we wouldn't need armies or navies or police or locks on our doors. And we know that's not realistic. We understand, of course, that's not reality, but that's not really the point. The point is the closer we can approach that ideal state in an organizational setting, uh, the better off we are as human beings, the more space we open up for human happiness and teamwork and prosperity and value creation and all the good things of life. If you take the second principle, imagine a world where every single person always did what they said they were going to do. Wow, what an amazing world that would be to live in. And of course, we understand as well that's not reality. It's not realistic, but that's not the point. The point is the closer we get to that ideal, the better off we are as human beings, the more space we open up for happiness, harmony, teamwork, prosperity, all the good things of life. And keeping commitments has measurable financial and economic value. So, uh, these are the most fundamental principles of human interaction. And, and, uh, what Chris did is he brought these two core principles to front and center, uh, as the very foundation of the entire enterprise and allowed it to not only build the first factory, but to build a second factory and then a third factory and expand operations up and down the supply chain toward customers and warehouses. Across North America and toward the supply in terms of farming and harvesting and transplanting and trucking, and to become the largest tomato processor in the world based on the most fundamental principles of human interaction.

Wow. Okay. I have 3 more questions. Some of them are super deep, so I'm going to try to prioritize them because I know we don't have a ton of time left. So I guess one of my first ones is around this idea of self-management and around that second principle, because this is something that I work with my coaching clients on, is keeping our words to ourselves, not necessarily to others, right? But keeping our words to ourselves. And this is something I think a lot of individuals, um, I can only speak for myself in my experience with my clients, but a lot of mothers and a lot of women struggle with because they want to make sure that everybody else is taken care of. And I'm sure there's plenty of men that struggle with this as well. And so we continuously break trust with ourselves and we continuously sacrifice our word to ourself. And so I want to just talk about that for a second because I don't think enough people talk about this idea of self-trust or trust within ourselves. So was that an awareness that you had in focusing on this second principle? Was it purely the external commitments and contracts, or was it also the internal?

I'd say both. I think the internal was more implied than expressed, but it's actually both. A commitment is a commitment, whether you make it to yourself or to another person, and commitments are the atomic structure of life and work. Commitments are the only things that exist between human beings. To the degree we keep commitments, we create virtuous, trustworthy enterprises. Keeping commitments to others and not to ourselves would be completely incongruent and make no sense. Individuals have to be thinking of commitments as, as absolute promises and We understand stuff happens, life happens, intervening events occur. Sometimes it's impossible to keep a commitment that we make to another person or to ourselves, in which case it's incumbent upon us to renegotiate the commitment. And that could be renegotiating with oneself. But it's incumbent upon individuals to reach out to others if if it's with another person, or to have that serious self-discussion about what real commitment, a renegotiated commitment, would look like. And either way, it's super important. And I agree with you that commitments to oneself are supremely important and probably is just as important as any other commitment.

Yeah, absolutely. I want to land this a little bit. And so I wake up this morning and, you know, I have a 7-month-old. When the last time we spoke. I think he was like 4 months old, 5 months old when we first talked about doing this interview. And if he woke up this morning and he's just super grumpy, stuffy nose, my throat is scratchy, and it's 20 minutes before we're recording this podcast, my values are I made a commitment to Doug. I don't want to cancel last minute. That would feel like breaking my commitment to you. And What you're saying is that there's this deeper commitment to myself that I have as far as in my core values and all of that, that I would email you and renegotiate, which in standard terms would be rescheduling this podcast. So how do you figure out how to balance all of that, Doug? Because like, I have a commitment to you, and so, you know, can't— can I just apply to what you said and renegotiate every commitment that I have at every moment all the time? Or is that, to me, that seems completely exhausting. But in the situation that I gave you with the podcast this morning, how are you navigating commitments in that situation?

In the situation you, you just gave me, it would be completely appropriate to reach out and ask to reschedule this interview with me because you have, uh, would have a clear situation, uh, that, uh, requires your attention and energy. And it's about your health and your baby's health and all those things. Absolutely renegotiable. And any reasonable person would understand that. If you simply had a situation where, you know, you woke up and, you know what, I just like to go out to breakfast with my friends this morning instead of doing that podcast with Doug, I'll just tell them I've got another, another thing going on. That's not really showing a lot of integrity. That's just, you know, substituting your own self-interest for a preexisting commitment. And that would not be okay. And then we could, we could look at a whole spectrum of different scenarios, but I think those two scenarios kind of illustrate the point.

Yeah, absolutely. And to be clear, my baby is feeling absolutely fine. So I'm grateful for that.

I'm glad.

My throat is absolutely fine.

Good to hear.

You know, I think we, I think, thank you. I think we illustrated it though, that at least to me, 80% of the commitment is to myself, my values, and you know, you use the word integrity, and so my integrity. And then it's, it's almost, I won't say easier because I don't want to use that word, but it's simpler to keep my commitments to others when I'm operating from that solid foundation of a deep self-trust. Would you agree?

Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. And the very definition of integrity is the degree to which one keeps commitments. That's the definition. So it's quite important.

I have such a deep trigger. I'm going to go to the second thing I wanted to talk about, but this kind of leads into it. I have such a deep trigger with this word of integrity because one of the things that we do when we go into organizations is develop with them, we collaborate on creating their core values or refining their core values if they already have them. And the amount of companies that choose integrity, just like off the bat. And there's this scene in, I think it's in Princess Bride, where the guy keeps using the word and the Spaniard says, "You keep using that word. I don't think you know what it means." And that's this moment that I have when we're working with companies around like, "Oh yeah, integrity is one of our core values." And so the fact that you just kind of laid it out and defined it, That is so great, and I'm open to hear your thoughts on that while I transition into this aspect that my last two thoughts are kind of connected. One is, you said you're aware that it's not a reality, that where we're not going to have war, we're not going to have force and all of that. And my first thought was, well, why are we so convinced that isn't a reality? And then my second thought around this which is in direct conflict almost, Doug, is Doug going into organizations and convincing them to eliminate all management and supervisors and all of that, which I know that's not what you're doing, but you're teaching this principle of self-management. That's never going to happen. Like, these companies that Doug advises aren't going to redo their entire hierarchy. And Those were my two thoughts. So, my first one was around like, well, why isn't that a reality? Why can't we, you know, have that agreement? And then the second was in direct conflict, like I said, of like, oh man, these companies that want to put integrity as their first core value but don't want to change really how they're operating, are they really buying this? And I'm just going to leave those thoughts here for open for discussion, wherever you want to take that.

Okay. Yeah, lots of companies, when they put values statements on the wall, they always have integrity. And I always question, do they really know what that means? I offered the definition, the degree to which one keeps commitments. The flow of commitments back and forth between individuals in the workplace is how work gets done in every workplace. Lots of companies also talk about accountability. We really strive for accountability. The fact is there's no such thing as accountability without an underlying commitment. Otherwise, to what would you presume to hold yourself or anyone else accountable if there's no underlying commitment? And so commitments are supremely important. They can take various forms. They can be long-term recurring continuous commitments, the kinds of commitments you make when you are hired into a new role at an organization and agree to perform certain activities and deliver certain services. They could be very short-term, ad hoc, discontinuous, the kinds of commitments you might make to a colleague passing them in the hallway at work. Yeah, sure, I'll get that report to you by tomorrow at 2 o'clock. Or they could be just trivial. Could you please hand me a pencil? Yes, I will. That's a commitment. But it's nothing anyone would record or remember for more than 2 seconds. So commitments take various forms, but they're all important. And so the degree to which one keeps commitments is how one forms a personal brand. And individuals are always branding themselves through every single conversation as a commitment-keeping person of integrity or something less than that. And so it's crucially important that people understand, especially leaders, understand what integrity means, what commitments mean, and what accountability really means. It's absolutely crucial. That's how work gets done. And the second part was, remind me again, Bunny, what the second part was.

The reality. Just, just the reality. So what I had said was, you know, you had said, I realize that's not the reality. And my first thing was, you know, why isn't that the reality? And the second part of that was I heard my own voice when you were talking about the work that you're doing with companies, saying it's not a reality where companies are going to throw away an organizational structure. So I just noticed the irony and kind of the competing desires in that. On one hand, I very much desire a world in which I can not worry about locking my door. And even though my husband is active duty in the military, so I may have a bias around this, the idea that we wouldn't need force in this world. Because also I look in nature and see like, where is force present and where is force beneficial? And so I was just taking my own thoughts and biases and kind of opening them up to you too, to, for discussion, because I thought it was interesting. On one hand, I'm like, why, why can't that be a reality? On the other hand, I was like, that's never going to be a reality.

Right. Organizations are hierarchical pyramids for a reason. And it started in 1841 with a train wreck on the Western Railway that killed a conductor and some other people. And so the Western Railway hired George Whistler,, to investigate and make recommendations, which he did. And, he borrowed, ideas from the Prussian military at the time and, uh, decided that what organizations needed was a hierarchical top-down command and control org chart, uh, where people worked in departments or silos. We had, uh, heads of departments. We had, uh, functional, um, structural hierarchy and bureaucracy. And that's the way we should be organized. And so, um, that was the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. And so every industry that evolved from that point on evolved in that structure. Uh, and it made sense at the time because that we pushed information around with Morse code at the time. And so, um, no fault, uh, to the people of 1841, that, that's what made sense. But today we're in a different world. Today we're in a world where information moves at light speed. Moves on wings of light, as George Gilder says, and people are able to get information to make decisions at the far edges and boundaries of organizations today. And so we can organize in a different way, and there are companies that are doing so. Jaipur Rugs in India is run, was founded by Nanda Kishore Chaudhary, They call him the Gandhi of the textile industry. He makes high-end luxury carpets. He has 40,000 carpet weavers from the untouchable class, mostly women in the poorest villages in India, all over India. They make high-end luxury carpets that last for centuries that have millions of knots that sell for thousands of dollars in luxury stores all over the world. And these women are collecting design awards at conferences in Europe. They're designing their own designs based on their own lives in villages in India. They are amazing artisans and craftspeople. They are completely self-managed. And so companies around the world are looking at this idea of self-management founded on commitments. Founded on accountability and giving people the autonomy and agency to do their best work. And this is not a concept that's going to disappear anytime soon. It seems to be burgeoning from what I can tell. It doesn't mean we're going to eliminate all hierarchy. It doesn't mean we're going to eliminate titles en masse. It's going to take time. To percolate through the capitalist system, but it is percolating and it is moving all across the USA and all around the world.

Okay, so then the other part of my question, why do you say it's not a reality to live without a military and live without force and our doors unlocked?

It's not a reality because Human history tells us it's not a reality. Human history tells us that we have a civilization that is, uh, really depends on human virtue and, uh, people aren't perfect. And so, uh, people in leadership classes often have a lust for power. Uh, the, there's a book called, uh, The Winner Effect, uh, how power affects your brain. And it talks about how individuals get a shot of dopamine in the brain when they exercise command authority and literally become addicted to power. And that neuroscience is ubiquitous. And that's why we have checks and balances in our society and our governance systems, because we're trying to check and balance that very human desire for power and control over other people.. And so that can be tenuous at times. We have to be careful and cautious and make sure that we keep that alive because if it gets out of control, as it did in Europe in the 1930s and Imperial Japan and other places, then it's very, very dangerous. And so keeping that power in check inside organizations is also quite important.

And how do we do that?

We do it through intentional design of organizations that incorporates deep principles of humanity, such as self-management, allowing people to have freedom and autonomy with accountability, balancing those things at all times and giving them the freedom and the power to to do their best work collectively and individually. OK.

I love this conversation. We could definitely just keep going, and I want to be mindful of the time. So how I want to leave this podcast is to kind of take this knowledge and put it into action, Doug. And so for those individuals listening that want to strengthen their self-management, want to strengthen their commitments with themselves, and want to reduce the amount of force in their lives. How do you take that into practice and how do you recommend taking that into practice?

People, if people want to learn the principles and practices of organizational self-management and personal self-management, just reach out to me. I can do, I can do individual coaching, leadership coaching, master classes. I've done those all across the USA and all around the world, individual one-on-one mentorship coaching engagements. You can read my books, The No Limits Enterprise or Beyond Empowerment. And I can also provide bibliographies of other relevant books and articles that can help people navigate an understanding of better ways of working as well.

I love that this started with having a state-of-the-art tomato processing plant and factory, and now, like, it's, it's not about the tomatoes. It's about this, this change in the organization that you guys built and how to take it further. So, Doug, thank you so much for spending this time with me and sharing all of your knowledge and your experience and your wisdom on the Yes And Podcast.

Thank you, Bunny Young. Been a pleasure. Thanks.

Absolutely. All right. So that concludes another episode of the Yes And Podcast. I'm going to make sure all of Doug's contact information and how you can reach out to Doug is in the show notes, as well as some links to resources such as his books so that you guys can take what you've learned on this episode and apply it if you're inspired into your own life and take that personal inventory and begin to create some more self-management in your world. And I want to thank you for wherever you took this episode, wherever you were listening, wherever you are taking these principles out into the world and how you are applying this Yes And concept to your lives. I'll see you on the next episode.