How Respect and Responsibility within Organizations will Change the World Forever with Marco Houwen #3

Hello, everybody. This is David Goldsmith. And welcome to Redefining Tomorrow. Today we're going to be exploring how respect and responsibility in organizations will change the world for the better. We have a good friend on the line, Mark o'. Howan. How are you?

I am extraordinary. Hi. Hi.

Okay. Hi to everybody. You're extraordinary today. That's fantastic. The reason I've got Marco on the line is we have become, I would say, pretty good friends over a short period of time. And he's from Luxembourg. I can't hold that against him yet. He has been involved in all sorts of different businesses that involve tech, that involve global positioning in terms of technology around the world. He has been involved in virtual currencies and fintech, all that. With everything he's done, he's made his transition, or made a transition to a strong focus on organizations, individuals within the organizations and organizations. So recently when I was talking, I said, did you want to be on the program? And I don't know, Marco, did you say, oh, my God, I would absolutely want to be on this program? Was that the word?

Absolutely, David.

So with that said, short introduction, as always, do you have some bullet points that we're going to be following? An outline that I can please have?

Absolutely. So I wanted to talk about few things today, and the bullet points are. Change the world. Workplace. Change the world. Hierarchical. Yeah.

Wait, wait. Change the world. Workplace.

Change the world.

Change the world. I'm going to use chemistry symbols just to keep up with you.

Okay, next, are hierarchical organizations doomed? Other models of hierarchy. Responsibility versus consequences. Respect and responsibility. The virtuous cycle.

You're gonna have to say that one again.

Respect and responsibility. The virtuous cycle. Circle. Sorry. And then if you still have some time, look into the crystal ball.

Okay, so we'll see if there was a Freudian slip in there when you said virtuous circle or cycle. Who knows? Could be. Okay, so let's start with this first one here. Change the world. Workplace. Change the world. Teach me something.

I wanted to tell you a little bit where I'm coming from and why I'm talking about respect and responsibility in organizations. So myself, after being an entrepreneur for so long, I really wanted to come up with something tangible. And how can I be of good in organizations in the world? How can I change the world? And the idea was, okay, humbly, where can I have an. I have. Have an impact and as I am from the corporate or from the. From the entrepreneurial world, not so much from the corporate. I thought, okay, when you look into the companies Today you see a lot of people are really not happy what they do, how they are doing it, how they are treated in their environment. And they are extremely frustrated very often. And so this frustration, I imagine these people are passing 50% of their awakened life. Well take the weekends out a little bit less of their awakened life. They're going to a job which they most of the time don't like, where they most of the time come home in the evening and they're frustrated. And we ask from them to be very forward looking, forward thinking and aware or awakened human beings. So that's a very difficult thing to do. So what I thought or what I wanted to focus on, what I want to focus on, what I'm focused on now is how can we create in the working organization, in the working environment the respect everybody has to get and how can we teach or make them understand the responsibility they have to take in this organization so that at the end of the day we have masses of people who go home in the evening and are less frustrated, hopefully happier, treating their people better at home and thinking about problems in the world in an open minded way and not a narrow or populistic or whatever way we see in the world today.

So when you, when you think about this and it's an admirable goal or admirable desired outcome to achieve, do you see, I know you could do one organization, you might, could do two, you might do ten. Watching what's happening in France right now, what has been the thousand, the revolts that have been happening just on decisions being made Today I received a text from somebody who I know is an unbelievable hard worker and she, she lost her job and very good at what she does. I sat down with an executive just recently and he said that the organization has completely Transformed from, from 20 years of being open and sharing and doing to a complete, I would call it dictatorial environment. And people are leaving in droves and it's challenging the workplace. And they're a very big company, they're a public company. So when you, when you say what you just said that you would like to do this, do you say you want to do it on a global scale or do you say I would like to influence organizations around me so that at least in my world, where I live or I engage, I'm making a difference?

There are different angles to that answer. Actually. There are different questions.

They're very different.

They're different angles. So I believe when a company changes from being open to being and becoming dictatorial and people are living in rows, as you say. I think that's a huge opportunity because there are people who exactly know what they want as a leadership style because they see what they don't want so they get it back, they go out and they will implement this kind of thinking into the next. Either the next company they will join or the next company they will create. So it's a nice dissemination method of what I just talked about.

No, it's just funny that you would with every, with all the talk over the centuries, if you want to call it, about organizations and helping people to move and you would feel that we're moving in a direction just like we were around the world in terms of democracy or enlightenment. And then I feel like we've kind of moved into the dark ages. So the analogy here, when you said you want to make people happy, you want to make them go home, the majority of people don't like where they work. They, they don't like their live work environment. And so it's an admirable challenge to take on.

Thank you very much.

And I think how would you do this? How would you.

Actually all the above all what you said. So first of all I created and created a workshop we are doing around this topic. So I work, I created an institute which is pushing this now in my country. I set up a community which works around mindfulness where we put all mindfulness.

I lost you.

You lost me.

I'm there now we're back.

Okay, okay. So, so, so bringing, bringing like happiness courses to children in schools and so on. So like that's all my local things I am working on now. When it comes to the dissemination on the global scale, I have my ideas even though I didn't have really time to work on that. But it will come. And for me what we need is we need all these consultants who are working on, on self managed companies setting up holacracies or deal management approaches into companies. We need these companies to be able to share their best practices and their knowledge through a very powerful sharing tool. And there are already examples like that which are working where decentralized entities are willing to share all the information because it helps them to move quicker. The biggest challenge you are facing, and you pointed it out totally rightly, is that if I'm a consultant and I go into a company and I want to make out of this company, just take the best case, a self managed company, it will take time, it will take years. So during that time I will be in that company, I will not get best practices from other ones. So that is an inhibitor on really on really moving fast. So my thought process on that is really to create an environment where these companies exchange with all together and they're already these kind of logics which are about to be set up and that that's how, how it can be accelerated.

Then I was just going to throw out. I personally knew last year lost his job and I don't know the quality of his work but he had a nice position and he recently said he's got a new job and I was very excited for him. So I met with him, we sat down and he said well I've got a new job but I'm really an outside consultant hired for the company. So I'm working in the company, this is my job. But I'm really just a contract person for three months at a time. And he said here's the irony. I am now Manning managing a team. I think it was 15 people and they are all contract people. And one of the companies that has the majority of the people is a company that wouldn't hire me. So I'm managing their people. So we really all don't work. The entire group does not work for the company but yet we're working for the company. So he's constantly on pins and needles as to well he get another three months. Will you get another six months? So the holocracy and the freedom and expression, I think there's a. There's. There's many trends going on around the world that I don't know are. That could be influential in the future organization and such that you're talking about.

Well, I think these are different, different challenges to tackle. So I agree that we are moving into what some call the gig economy. But there you even more need to have an open line of communication being totally able to have this respect and take on responsibility. You have to know how to do that otherwise your risks are even higher of not being hired Further. So how to handle the fact that we are moving in such a gig economy? I think that would be another, another hour of discussion. We cannot, we're going to take one hour to type. We can take on without any problem.

But so, so when we take change the world, change the work, change the world workplace, we change the world. Is there any other, any tools or pieces of information within that context that you want to share that I need to know?

Absolutely. Over the next few, over the next. In the next few bullet points. Yes, we can go through.

Okay.

Yes.

So what's next? So what do I need to know.

So Etros wants to touch down about hierarchical organizations and as said, the bullet point are they doomed? And to give a little bit of a background like where I'm coming from, we have hierarchical organizations since eternity and we haven't mostly because we didn't have the capacity to really communicate directly. So I always take this example 150 years ago when there was an order to give to the next city, then there was somebody writing it down on a paper, give it to a delivery man or mailman who took his horse and rode and rode to the next village. It's just like you could not think about how to implement really an, a viable structure which would be self managed now maybe as in prelude of to what comes later. I'm not saying that everything should become self managed, but I think that could be the outcome of a lot of environments. Now when we talk about this hierarchy, we also see that the generation, the young people, the generation Z, which a lot of executives today call lazy, not effective hats in the cloud and so on. Well, why are they like that? Because in essence, when we look at Maslow's pyramid, they are not anymore in the survival mode. Like we all, like David, yourself, myself, we both and most of us were linked somehow still to world war. And we still have this, this really directly at least was for our parents like this feeling of total survival in us, which inherently makes you easier to accept hierarchy. Now our kids, they are in the self actualization mode. So they want to know why is that for? Why do I have to do that? Is this really necessary? If we are not changing the way how we talk to them or how we run the hierarchy for them, if you're not giving them, and then come back to my two words, respect and responsibility. We will not create in a world where we still hire people. So that's not in the, in the gig economy, we will not create people who are, who are effective. So we have to find a solution. And I see that all over. If I talk to companies and to HR people, they always tell me, well that's exactly the problem. As soon as we set up a team, as soon as we set up a project where we can, where everybody can take some kind of a responsibility, then we can move forward. If I give them or the manager gives them just a pile of paper to work on, it's like okay, and now so it's not working anymore the way it was working before.

I think the way you're also talking, maybe I get this wrong, is you're talking about first world Challenges for people who are not in survival mode. And yet I see around the world a tremendous amount of people even in first world societies that are, that are in survival mode. So if when you talk about self actualization or you talk about individuals within the ages of say 18 to 35, yes, they've had some of that. Yet they might also be saying, I don't know if it's worth what we've seen later, earlier generations go through to then lose it all. Because we've had the dot com bubble, we've had the Great Recession that did permeate through Europe and US not as much Asia. Is that influencing, I mean when you say that they're a self actualization mode, are you primarily talking about first world people who've done well for themselves?

Well, I talk about the today, all these terms are really getting blurry. I talk about industrialized world as such. So it's about the generations which get up in the morning and the first thing they do is taking their smartphone. And yes, some of them are in survival mode. I totally agree. But then again they have a totally different way of communicating than, than we had as, as, as kids. So they are totally, they're totally wired differently when it comes to how they, how they interact. So, so.

And yes, my kids, my kids used to sit on different sides of the house and text each other about both of us.

That's good.

In the house, they wouldn't talk to each other, they would just text about each other across. And we could see them doing it. They weren't even talking. We could see them, they could actually see each other, but they were not talking. So yes, they can communicate differently.

And I think because of that, yeah, there are differences. There are differences and I acknowledge that I live in a bubble in Luxembourg, but I'm not seeing only Luxembourg. I had companies all over the world and I saw this in Indonesia. I saw how incredibly driven these people are. Actually. I always felt when I flew home from Asia to Europe, I felt really flying home to the old continent. It's like, wow, going back to boring. So there is this incredible strive to do. But I don't think that today you can work, you can impose the same way you did before. And there is an analogy which we could use. When the workforce of the end of the 1900s really started to become powerful and to really think for themselves, there was a very large world war which forced them all back to align in northern Belgium and France. Yeah. And then they had to follow orders. So we created a hierarchy through an incredible necessity Now, I don't think that this is possible anymore today because I think that today through the fact that we have this world wide web, but we have this potential of communications. I don't think that we can see the same, like the same concentration of how we can get people back to where we want to have them doing exactly what they are told.

So when you're saying hierarchical organizations are doomed.

I asked the question. I asked the question hierarchical organizations do. I don't think they are doomed. I think they are doomed to change. So I don't think they're doomed.

So we still will have hierarchical organizations, but yet in a different structure. Or do you see? How would you see? If they're not doomed, they will be. Then they'll be transitioned into what? What would they look like? Give me a feeling.

It's very good. It's my third bullet point. So there would be other. There can be other models and there were other models. It's very funny to see, like in ancient Greece, you had the Athenian democracy which just made a lottery. You could become the leader just by a lottery. And there's a lot of interesting thoughts about that around that. Because if you do a lottery, you definitely were not the one who was striving to get this position. So you weren't bribed to do whatever somebody told you or to have a better marketing campaign or so on. You were most likely more prone to be ready to do and to take decisions in the interest of everybody, even though you still had your own interest. But at least you were not as biased as we can see that today and will not go into politics now. But we see today bias means when it comes to politics. So that is or was an interesting way of doing. But what we also see in communities, and I looked up and I follow a community which I really admire. It's called the Damon Hur community. Damon Hur is just for the D A M O N D A M A N H U R and Diebenher is a community in the northern part of Italy. And these people declare themselves a country while they are not declaring war to Italy. So they are still part of Italy, but in their way of seeing themselves, they are declaring themselves as a country. And this is something which started in the end 70s by an artist who just wanted another way of living. They are organized today in seven different villages and they are round robbing leadership. So every six months somebody else takes over leadership. So what does that mean? It creates the necessity of everybody to think about how he would do that. It creates everybody has to grow up actually. And everybody has to live up to really running a village or running the whole, the whole environment or the whole country without being a country. And I think it's an extremely interesting way of how hierarchy can work. Again, it is not creating a hierarchy by entitlement. It's not creating a hierarchy which is unnecessary. It's just a hierarchy which is needed because, well, you need sometimes somebody who speaks up. You need also sometimes somebody who can take a split second decision. So that is another way of hierarchies. And then what we see so out of my dao leadership angle in the workshops, what we see is what I would call flexible leadership. If you are able to introduce and to have this respect and responsibility flowing in the organization, then everybody can stand up for a project and say, well, this is where I have more information, more knowledge, I do better. I'm really prone to do that. And as we call it, he declares leadership and he says, okay, that's my project. I declare leadership. Doesn't mean that he takes all the decision by himself because we already are in a self managed or decentralized decision taking modus. But he takes leadership in this environment. And this is the way I see in the future working, working very well in organizations too.

There's a company, a guy by the name of Chris Roofer, which I don't know if you got to him in the book, Paid to think there's a. He has really, it's the company he owns called Morningstar Packaging and they create tomato paste, tomato sauce, tomato thing, tomato items. What they do is he was a guy who created the concept of taking the water out of tomato paste and then tomato sauces and things and creating paste and then shipping it because he didn't feel you need to ship water. What his product is, is not as important. He has, I think, a few thousand employees today. They all are hired by him, every single one of them. They're given a job and whenever someone needs to rise to an occasion, they become the leader and then they drop back down to their normal position. And I don't think I've found any other company that's been able to mirror that type of system out there. And I looked up this, this Dame Demon Hur, a federation of Damon her. So they actually called it federation.

Well, they kind of call themselves a country because they would have a vote.

They're a commune, eco village, spiritual community about 50 miles north of Turin. I'd never heard of them before, so. So with the flexible leadership style you're saying that people can stand up and say I'm ready, this is mine. Are they accountable to that when they say that or do they.

It's a matter of responsibility.

But they've taken its self responsibility and they've been given it. But what happens if they're not good enough at it?

Then somebody else can declare leadership. That's, that's what happens. This is only working in companies and where, where you already have this thought processes in place, where you have the mindset in place then that that's working. Because if they're not good enough, if everybody knows that they're not good enough at it, everybody will say hey guys, they're not good enough. That comes what we call with radical honesty. So one of the challenges we are facing in organizations today is that we are all trying to please each other and we are not honest with each other. And that's one of the things which has to change when we talk about mindset in organizations. It's like we have to be way, way more open and way more honest to each other. And that is that if you have that environment then that's not a problem. If the guy who declares leadership cannot or is not delivering or is not, then it will self regulate. That doesn't mean that he has to go. It just means that his leadership here is not really. Maybe that very often happens is a project changes and that during one phase there is one person who is the best, but then there comes the next phase and like the one in one phase we talk about C development, another one we talk about Java, whatever. And during that. So you better take another leader and that self regulates. So I think it's like that, that you have to see it now. This will not be something you can implement into any company tomorrow for exactly the reasons you said. Because if somebody is not living up to it and how we are prone to run companies today is we will always suck it up to our leader and not telling him because. Because we think oh, what will happen to me if I do that? So, so, so we will not be able to, to be honest because the hierarchy is not letting us. That's one of my deepest beliefs is you cannot be honest in a classical hierarchy company very often because too much is at stake. It's like your job is at stake, your existence is at stake. At least that's how you see it at that moment. So you can imagine there is somebody in the company really like a manager who's really pushing you, is mobbing you. He's like what is your possibility you go up and see his boss, what will he say? You don't know. Maybe he will be okay, maybe not. Maybe he will talk directly to the other one and your life will be more miserable. It's a very big challenge. And that's the challenges we are facing and the inefficiencies we are facing in classical managerial and hierarchical organizations today. And I believe that over time it's possible to strip that out. One thing I came across a year, six, nine months ago and really, really fascinates me is intent based leadership. It's a word coined by David Marquette, who was an former US Navy submarine, nuclear submarine captain who was put on a boat without notice to that class of boat. And he got the leadership of that boat and he actually found out that he is not able to take decisions on this boat because he does not know how it works. And he had at his first going out into the sea in the Maui area, he actually gave an order which was then repeated by the xo, repeated by the helms guy. And at the end nothing happened because this order was not existing on that boat. That was the moment where he got aware of the fact that this is not working. Not only that I don't know the boat because I didn't have time to adapt to it, but on top of that, everybody in the hierarchy is following my order without questioning it and we cannot execute. So he took the decision of not taking any decision himself on his boat anymore. So it's not totally correct. He kept one decision is when to fire a weapon. That was the one he kept. And he created something which is called intent based leadership. And in essence what he's doing is he is bringing the decision to the one who has the information. Now this sounds very simple, but it means that we are for an example out of his world is that at one moment in time he had this really great guy who was a sailor and who did a good job but became more and more frustrated. And as he was about to assess his situation because he had to take over this boat, he talked to the guy and said, why are you not as performant as you were three weeks ago? And he said, listen, can I open, Speak open freely, speak freely. And the guy said, honestly, I filed for a leave six months ago because of the marriage of the wedding of my brother. Now this wedding is approaching and we are three weeks ahead and I still don't have my slip back. So I don't have a ticket. I don't know if I can have a ticket if I still get It I will pay a ticket which is way too expensive to fly over to the US and so on and so on. So it's a simple thing. What did he do against all Marine rules? He just said so the quartermaster is the one who takes the decision point. This kind of, of decisions were taken in a split second. Like took, took a week max. And what do you create with that? You create somebody who, you create a person who is ready, who is ready to take, to take on, who is happy, who gets, who gets his response, who can combine his private with his, with his professional life and so on and so on. So you, you create a way better environment. And that's all we want. All I am wanting to do when I talk about how to, how to create, how to change workplace, it's.

And in my heart of hearts, I love the idea.

Yes.

And at the same time I'm challenged with it. And you know me well enough that I get challenged when I start trying to figure out how these things work. I'm going to give you an example of how that challenge might, might have to. I don't know, I'm trying to see it. And I've seen so many of these different versions. Holacracy has not been as successful as people expected. Google had a Holacracy division, I think with their cloud base and they had to take it down. Zappos had a lot of challenges going through their orientation. There are some successes, There are definitely some, but not. But let me share with you. There's this guy by the name of Michael Shellenberger or something of that. I don't know what exactly. Probably have to look it up. And he has been a huge advocate of solar green tech, solar, wind, all of this, the elements that go into green in that way. Hugely huge proponent of it. And what they, over time, what they have started to realize is all these solar panels that last about 20 years are toxic and they're, when they're done, they're going to have to be sent someplace. He noticed that windmill a, a solar farm where you would collect solar energy would require football fields of destruction to be able to make a simple city, be able to operate. Killing ecosystems, hurting tortoises, where people would be crying as they're pulling tortoises out of their homes because they know they're going to die. He noticed that there were a lot of birds, not as much the small birds, but big birds that were being killed due to windmills. And they're very inefficient, they're efficient, they're becoming more efficient, but they're overall, they're fairly inefficient compared to what other technologies are out there. They also concluded, and this has been going on for years and years and years. This is just not a new thing. So my point is when you hear it is someone stood up and said let's do it this way. They ended up finding out that. And I don't even know if he's right. I'm just using his, the data that I had heard from him. When you look, there are 7 million people killed per year due to certain toxicity, whether it be coal or smog. There are animals and ecosystems being killed. And he went through all of the data and then they took a look after they looked at the ecosystems of all of them and they're pretty, pretty bad. How devastating these new techs are in the green space. And he took a look back at this technology that we have called nuclear. France has been running on it. Germany went to the green side and their energy has doubled in the past decade. I don't know how the exact years, but it's doubled and it's pretty high to invest in these technologies. And what he concluded after nuclear puts nothing into the air, it's pretty much green. The toxicity that they create goes into a small room and all the other tech that we're looking at using creates waste throughout the process. And he said for a person who believed all of this for all these years, I, I now am saying that if Germany had followed France's position, we wouldn't have all these challenges in France or in other countries. So my point is when someone stands up and says they know, I don't know how you stop them from being the person to lead when they really don't. They sell better, they look better, they network better, they write better. How are you addressing in these flexible leadership and intent based leadership thoughts?

Are you asking me if you think that I am right or if I think that I could mistaken what I say?

No, no. How do you manage that? No, I'm asking you how do you manage the fact that there are a lot of situations I know you've been in where someone was promoting something that was not as well understood, not as well thought through, they're great at selling and the team goes that way and yet that was the worst move to make.

So what we always say in our workshops is it's not about the decision, it's about the propositions on the table. So. So decision making in a self managed environment is a very small part. But you have to create the environment and let's say the company ecosystem where the best ideas come up and are set. That's the biggest challenge. That's actually why we do what we do.

It's not the best idea. The best idea is supposed to come up. But what you're saying is the best idea believed to be created by that group comes up even if the worst idea is never explored. The best idea is never explored.

There, dude.

Because the people in the group, because you've got an open framework, you've got 10 people sitting at a table and you have the ability to be able to hopefully bring the ideas up. Yet human nature has different types of characteristics. People, people are shy, people are intimidated, people don't know how to present their ideas. And you still in those environments are going to have the normal, I'm going to call it normal, let's say a historically evidential existence where the bad ideas are still those that are selected for the wrong reasons.

Actually, that's one thing I wanted to cover a little bit later. But it's one of the points I talk about when it's what causes people to take responsibility.

And is that our next one was.

That, no, I don't have to go there.

Consequences or was that the, the, this cycle, the circle.

It's responsibility and versus consequences. But okay, so it's what causes people to take responsibility. And, and one of the things to come back to your point is people need to feel, they want to get that they, that they will not get in trouble when they speak up. So when they point out flaws or come up with what we would call a bad idea, because only if we, only if the bad idea of the stupid or the bad ideas are coming out, the good ones coming out too. So anything which comes up is important. There is no doubt.

You have an inherent belief. You have inherent belief that the people sitting at the table because of the open and the transparency, if we want to call it that. You know my take on transparency.

I know.

Which is that we're only selectively transparent. You believe that the people at the table because of this organizational structure will do everything it takes to learn, grow, develop, be on time, manage their emails, manage their process, manage everything that's in their lives. So when they sit at that table, they can be the best they can be.

What's the alternative?

I don't know. I'm, I'm really, I'm just trying to get, I'm trying to get my mind around the conceptual side of it more than I am saying that there's an alternative. I'm, I, I've seen organizations which need to be one way and my, my belief and again that's a personal. I would say that that organization functions extremely well that way. A lot of people love where it is and they, they gravitate to that type of leadership style. And then there are other organizations that are completely different modeling and people gravitate to those.

You know, we saw companies who were almost totally self managed going back other ones like just take one which right now makes in the US some noise is Patagonia who want to give back the money or give the money they got back from the tax reform, from Trump's tax reform. They want to give it back to charity.

Patagonia has been an excellent example of a different type of organization.

Yes. And it is working. There are other companies which are not which do it since a long time, which once it works better, less is like Gore is like one of the grandfathers of what we're talking about here. But yeah, we are all human and it's not perfect. But that's why I provocatively ask what's the alternative? The alternative is, is that everybody's like, yeah, we have a hierarchy and we just have to do what somebody tells us what we have to do. And we get inherently more and more inefficient because more and more the workforce is not able and not ready to work that way. So I see all the challenges you're talking about. I see them too. And I think we have to tackle them one by.

Let me give a different perspective and I'm trying to get my mind around this. Let's say we were to not call it an organization because I think the minute we use the term organization, there inherently is a structure and we've as humans tried to come up with alternative structures consistently over time. So what I did in my own head as I'm trying to make this work for us in this call this, this interview is what if we looked at different word was. I don't even think the word structure, organization, it really challenges it is that when you need something on the net, let's call use that as an example. When you need something, you can call upon its resources and then you can stop using it whenever you need it. Yet when I try to picture the net, I really can't. I see nodes all over the place. That's my mental modeling. It's just no, no, no, no, no, no. No big one small ones connected, some central, some not central. And the information flow within them are in different bands. If I was to think of an organization and someone said how are you organized? Or who do I talk to? I think the challenge is mentally how do I understand how decisions are made and how the organization functions. I think that that's probably the biggest hurdle. How do you mentally model with 7.5 billion people, you've heard me use that term all the time. With 7.5 billion people in the number of organizations in the world, the hundreds of thousands or millions of millions of organizations, how do they, how would they look? What floor are you on? How do you pick your floor? Are you free to pick your floor? Is it like an open shop? I have trouble getting my mind around it.

Well, there are a lot of different models. There is no, I've seen.

There's a lot of different models.

What I can say is if we. And our start of thinking about this was in this ICO dao space. So it's like at what I, for the lack of a better name would call the holy grail of self managed environment is. Yeah, then there everything is decided together like who gets what proposition, what project proposition will be taken, will be voted on. What next new office would be taken. But there are very few offices in this environment but will be voted on. Yes, they are doing that. So is that the right model for everybody? For sure not. But it is one model which works and which shows us the way that it can work on that extent. That's why today I'm not saying that every company should become a self managed company. I'm rather saying that a hierarchy and hierarchical organization has to think and to assess where they can create an environment or what environment they can create for their employees to gain more efficiency through gaining more fulfillment of that more fulfillment of their, of their, of their workforce.

And so let's, let's then let's define this a little bit differently. Maybe this helps me to understand this is that what we're saying is we have organizations and I'm going to use a term and you're gonna, you're gonna laugh because we've named a program after this, the two of us. So we have organizations that should be in constant flux picking and selecting areas within the organization where these type of structures can exist. And then there are times where they don't, where they morph and where they don't.

Let me answer with an example which is a real, real time example or real example. Maybe you heard about the company called a hedge fund called Bridgewater Associates, Richworth Associates is Ray Dalio top hundred richest person in the world. And he created or recreated his company because he felt he went bankrupt. And then we created the company over the last 40 years through one principle is, well, I failed once because I thought I was right. Now I will not fail again because I will always. I now know that I will not be right. So I will always work with other ones to find, to take the best decision. And he did everything around that and scaled the company. And we'll not go through the whole principles book. So anybody who wants to read that, it's a great book. But he scaled his company from himself to 15 to 150 to 3,000 people. And he still kept an environment where everybody had access to any information. Everybody could vote on anybody in meetings and saying, Ray really was not prepared today. He was really bad. So the intern can do that to Ray and so on. And he created an idea meritocracy which works for his company. But now he had a big. He had a big challenge when he was dropping out as CEO from Bridgewater. They got, they got from the competition, they started to become pressure and there were spies inside and there were very important and damaging information to the, to the company which were, which were leaking. And he had exactly that challenge. What are we doing now? Are we closing off and we going back to whatever classical company is out there or how do we handle that? And he created what he called, let me get the right word now, an embargo of data embargo. So he created a procedure very well defined and accepted by everybody. How long a data will not be. Will not be available because of the fact that it is an inherent risk for the existence of the company. And he put that in place and he created this procedure and that's what it is all about. In these kind of moments, there will be best practices for procedures to put in place. And if there is not, there has to be something which is one which have to be invented. And that's where I am. And I agree with you that I am an eternal optimist. But that's where I see this taking up speed as much as more and more we will have this kind of procedures and best practices out more and more this can be used, and that's where I see a role is to create an environment where we can speed this up, where we can speed the exchange of this best practices up. What Ray does with his principal books is. It's brilliant. It's just amazing that somebody at his position who has really no need to write books and to go through that and to do Book tours, being at his position, he's doing it because he wants to share, he wants to give his best practices. And they are not right for everybody, but they are a start for a lot of solutions, a lot of problems, which there has to be solutions found.

As we're talking, I'm thinking through the writing of my book and I'm thinking from what I've read, I never touch on organizational structure, even though I deal with it often. I don't touch an organizational structure in the book because to some degree it was my belief, maybe this came out of Six Sigma, is that Six Sigma is really just teaching people at a lower level to be able to make better decisions. It's a structural process. You learn how to be able to address a challenge and then through that process, more and more people are capable of it. Therefore, the organization should be stronger. And they never promote it that way. It's just a skill set. A skill set in a way of an art, as an organization has these capabilities. I've always believed that if you can get more individuals to understand how to be able to do their roles at a higher level, you will improve the organization's performance. And I've been in so many different types of organizations and culturally different types of organizations, whether a Korean who's running the business from Korea or someone who's a Russian running the business, or Israeli. I don't know much about Luxembourg's small structures. I'm teasing you.

No, they're very small, for sure.

I've seen different environments all over and I haven't been able to come up with a ubiquitous a way of doing business that I think is transferable. Transmutable. Transmutable. That comes from the ICO space is a. An organization that really has and can be used everywhere at any time. So I. Let's go into this next topic. You had, and we're going to go over models and you had responsibility and responsibility. Yeah, exactly.

Responsibility versus consequences. I think it's very important. And so when we dig into the people in organizations like, you don't have to take responsibility. That's your choice. The consequence behind is never your choice. Because take an example, if I am. I ran my global company, had offices in Palo Alto and in Singapore and Luxembourg was flying around the world and I didn't care about myself. I didn't care at all. Change, fortunately. But at that time I was massively as overweight. I was, I was just, I was not sleeping and so on. So that was a choice. I didn't work out and that was a choice. The consequence was that I got very, very, very tired and started to be very sick. That's the consequence. I didn't, I couldn't change that consequence, but I could have changed the choice. I could have changed to taking my responsibility. And that's what in an organization you always have to think about is you have to take. You don't have to take the responsibility on to make this report tangible and good, but you have to live with the consequence that you will have a bad, bad performance report or you don't have to take on financials. You know, I don't have time to take on. I'm a CEO, what do I have to do about financials, blah, blah, blah. But at the end, if things are going wrong, you have to handle the consequences. And that's the. For me, when it comes to responsibility, it's extremely important that we think about that because that gives us the right motivation. If I may ask, may use that word. Well, to take responsibility. We rarely think about the consequences really through in an organization when we do something wrong, it starts with anybody. It starts with, for me, the most important person in the company, which is, well, today that changed, but that was in the older days was the lady who took the phone. If she is very, very angry and not talking nice to people, well, that's really bad for your company. She doesn't think about the consequences, but she will suffer them. In the best case, she will only be fired. In the worst case it will cost some major customers and it could put them into trouble. So for me, this is a very important concept.

So how do you get individuals to understand those consequences and live with them and breathe them. I've got so many flying through my.

Head that people lose. I'd love to hear, can I maybe rephrase? And that is actually what we talked before is how can we. What is motivating them? What caused them to take, to take responsibility? Caused people to take responsibility. And what is calling them is that people, they need to feel that something of value is at stake. So they need to see that taking the receptionists, she needs to understand that she is important and that if she's not doing it, then there will be customers lost. I think it would not be good if she would always focus on the fact that she would lose her job. Because then again that's negative motivation. But people need to believe that it is possible that what they have to take responsibility on, they can achieve. You cannot ask, you could not have asked to people in the end of the 40s to say, now we have to go to the moon. That was only possible when JFK said that, 1959, when there was a way down that road. Even so, there was still a lot things to do, but it looked feasible. You have people. Yeah, please.

But how do we. I don't disagree with the conceptual side. The hypothesis.

Yes.

If in fact we can get individuals to understand that their responsibilities and how they act and the decisions they make have consequences. The challenge that I have is how do you make that hypothesis work so that they understand those consequences at the time in which they're often doing them, where they don't feel that. How many times have you said, have you thought about how I bought that? I shouldn't have bought that. I said that I shouldn't have said that. I wish that I could go back in time. And I'm not a going back in time person, but I've heard these expressions so many times. That was not the right choice to have made. I think that individuals, when they make choices at the moment, what they make them are making the best choice that they think will work out in the way they anticipate it. I think that overall human nature is that way. You have a set of choices in front of you and you say, this is the best option for me. I'm not going to do the work today. I'll be fine tomorrow. You know, you won't be fine tomorrow, but you feel that way. I'll watch this movie, I'll go out with my friends. I'll spend the money on this or that. I won't hire that person. I'll hire this person. There's something that triggers people, triggers an individual to believe that they're making the best choice every time, even if they know they're not.

So there's something we teach in our workshops. It's what I call creating the secure framework of communication. For me, everything starts with that. So you have to. And maybe let me say that up front, not everybody fits into that because some people are deciding not to fit in there. But you have to create a safe place of communication means that people can open the door, tell each other things, which they have to tell each other. So there is a way how. And that's very cultural, that really is different in Korea than it is in Lithuania or in the US because people are different. That's what actually make it even more difficult in decentralized organizations. But you have to create a safe place where people can exchange and then they can voice their concerns in the light of this framework. And Then they are heard in the light of this framework. And then they will take this kind of responsibility not lightly, because they are in this framework now. It's very nice, theoretically, and it takes a lot of time to put that into organizations, but it is the way to go.

Okay. I'm still trying to get my mind around it. Let's take this and take. Well, they. I. I can. I understand the conceptual side.

Yes.

I just don't see. I'm. I'm looking around the world. I got my eyes closed.

Yeah.

And I'm saying. Okay. I see it working in places, and I see a lot of it not working.

Yeah, I agree.

And it's. It's a. It's a feel good. You can go to a conference and people can make you rah, rah. They could tell you a variety of things. You can go to a seminar and they sound good. I often say, whatever you hear in a seminar, make sure that person will sit right next to you when it doesn't work, because you. I personally don't deliver anything that I haven't used before in the real world. That's not, say, won't work everywhere, but I use what I've seen work, and I don't see a lot of these things always working. So I. Conceptually, it sounds great. And you have children and I have children, and it's tough to get it to work for them. It's tough to get it to work for our spouses. Well, let's put it this way. It's tough for them to get us to do it the way that they would like us to do it. And.

Well, I can dig deeper into that, into the tools I see necessary there. I don't know if you want to do that.

Give me one or two tools. Give me one or two tools. I need something to help me understand how you're making this transition instead of it being hypothetical.

It really is necessary that we all understand that we all link to each other, that we all have an inherent link to each other. So. So it starts to be. Actually our book. We start with. With saying that everybody should meditate. I know that we discussed. Both of. We discussed that already. It's not about meditation to. To feel closer to God. It's about to find this moment of peace in yourself so that you can find the moment of peace, of dissolving your ego when it. When it is around having. Having a discussion where you think and you feel. And maybe you are. Because most of the times we are. All the times we are right. But it is not about being right. And that is what we put in place. It's about your own authenticity. It's about accepting that you are doing mistakes, that you are a jerk, as we call it in the book. You are a jerk. I'm a jerk. I do a lot of wrongdoings, and I see that. And it's not about so much about changing it, but it's about knowing it. And if you create this environment where most of the people actually in this environment, all the people who are still in this environment are seeing that, then you have an environment where you can discuss and where you can create this, what I said before, this framework of this safe place of communications. And that's only two tools. Another tool is really getting aware that we talked about honesty. So really implementing radical honesty around subjects. That doesn't mean that you have to tell at your workplace, your private life. It means that when it comes to somebody failing, that you tell him that he failed, that it comes to somebody doing something wrong, that he did something wrong. We actually discussed it earlier, David, when we talked about transparency and being transparent and not doing the library omission. So.

Let me just clarify that for those of you listening. I have had this phrase that the biggest lie that people tell is the lie of omission. And what that means is we tell the things we want to say, but often we don't say, we don't share, we don't open up to all of the other thoughts that we have. So by not saying something, you are actually in essence, lying. And it says, my shortened way of saying the biggest lie we tell of all is the lie of omission. We don't tell somebody, yeah, we saw this person, we did that, we drank this, we participated, we bought that, we just let it go. And if we were being honest or transparent, we would.

Exit.

So, okay, so meditation, one honesty being another.

It's, it's being aware of your own authenticity. I, for me, it's. It's all about awareness. It's all about being aware of your own authenticity. It's all about being aware of yourself. It's not so much about changing yourself. It's about knowing yourself and accepting what you know.

I'm really trying to do that every day of my life. Me too. I've, I, I, you know, and we are failing dramatically. But, yes, I'm. Well, I'm discovering I like a lot of things about me, and I'm transforming a lot of those. I'm making as many changes as I possibly can. And I feel at times, recently I'm, I'm almost being beaten up every day. Beaten up of myself and beaten up not in a negative way. Meaning someone's exposing something because I've asked them a question or, or someone has shared something that I had. I was willing to open myself up to sharing and in the sharing I found something new which I need to address. And I don't. I'm going to say that everybody could do this. Yet I think I'm being stretching a lot. I think that we all have capability of doing it, yet it's not an easy thing to do. It's a very hard thing to do.

Yes.

So I agree it's, it's, it's enjoyable if you can get through it. And some things that I've learned, I've really appreciated. It's a lot of self reflection within that. So, so let's go to this. The circle of.

What did I say here? The respect and responsibility, the virtual circle. We talked about it and we touched base on it already. So I wanted to touch base and say why does some hierarchical organizations still work fine? So we talked about it a little bit, but because they take it from the respect side. So maybe they're not giving so much responsibility directly to their workforce, but they are really respecting their workforce deeply. Not like with the classic, not an artificial, artificially. And I love to quote on this one, I love to quote Louis xiv, the sun God in France, who was maybe the first king who was really working in history and he was able to send thousands and thousands into war and into death. But he's reportedly was always extremely respectful to anybody who he was meeting. And if that was the mate who made his bed or the guy who take care of his horse. And I think if we have an organization where there is this genuine deep respect for people, then what happens? People will take up and take responsibility without somebody asking them and they will drive it forward. So there is this virtuous circle driving this positively. So that brings me back to what I said before. There is no organization, no, there is no organizational framework today which we can say that is the one which will be the one of the future. It's all about these two words. It's all about respect and responsibility. So if you have companies who are really, really respecting, where you have a caring CEO, a caring leadership environment that people will work, people will be very, very, very efficient and there are still most likely things which could be changed. But it will help the organization of being totally. It helps the organization of being efficiently in the, in their, in their Environment.

It's. I typed in the words as we were talking. Yeah, I like what you're saying because it would be nice if humans could be that way.

I love it. We are really not agreeing.

Well, there's the utopian view and you're more of a utopianist and I tend to be more of a pragmatic person when I look at. So I, I'm. I'm kind of fixated on the Holacracy only because it was brought up. I haven't heard the word Holacracy in a long time. And I'm trying to say where is the convergence from business management theory, strategy and modeling conceptualization that's been happening? The, let's call it the. The Internet and the sensors and the tech that built around that, the algorithms that are created by individuals who often don't know the balance of what happens and the consequences of their responsibility, they just, they believe they know they create and that little algorithm impacts lives all over the place. And I was just reading the National Society of Leadership and Success, which I have no clue who they are. And they talked at the. Julie Cullen, a partner in a consulting firm which accepted Holacracy, she then left, said that while we were trying to be. To implement this tack, this model, that they stopped looking at their pain points, they stopped looking at innovation, that they had an unclear strategy, that their critical market feedback, that they were getting low morale, they were so much focused on being open and transparent that they kind of lost track of the other activities that were necessary to run an organization that there's another point within here that says one of the people who helped to create the founders of Holacracy, Brian Robertson, he never worked in a formal management position. So he really did. He was an entrepreneur, he did a CTO stint, but he really didn't know the process. So I like, I love the thought and I love that openness and sharing. And I think you know me as a person, I am that in many ways I could also be the jerk on the other side too. I love these conceptual, this conceptuality in nature and I'm maybe I'm hoping that the talk about decentralization, the talk of the challenges we're facing on Planet Earth, the new tools that are out there, whether they be, if you like them, a Slack or an Astana, these type of techs that allow people to collaborate differently, maybe they'll open that door, maybe they'll help to open that door. Maybe timing is better today than it was before.

I think exactly that and I think Coming back to Holacracy. Holacracy has a very procedural way of addressing this challenge. Till management has a very like bird's eye view on addressing the challenge. Well, you know me good enough to know that I'm more prone to go down the teal management exactly because of the fact that processes have to be adapted into any organization and they cannot be imposed through a framework because an organization, when it has its age, it has all this living organism. And you cannot say now we will change all the processes because this is. And then exactly what is exactly happening what you just said. So let's comes back to what I said at the beginning of our interview. That for me it's not so much about creating a self managed organization, it's creating an environment where we take the company at the point they are now and bring them to the next level where whatever that may be, where we are not stretching them in a way. And I didn't talk about it, I had that as a point. It's the biggest enemy of this change very often are the ones for whom we are doing it for the people. Because this is such of a change for conceptually in their minds that it is not something which is easy to do. So you. And as soon as you create too much of a stretch, well then you have exactly what you said. You create a company which will just do. Do openness and the product which makes absolutely no sense. So, so, so it is.

Well, it's folk. It's the focus. Because it's almost as if you have to accelerate getting people to the awareness.

Yeah.

Fast enough so that they don't trip over some of the other challenges. And we're all at such different states of mind or in different states of mind that as you say, meditation. Meditation for some people, they love it. It's their lifeblood. And I've talked to these individuals and they'll say, yeah, I can meditate, I can clear my mind for five minutes. Thinking, okay, before I got in this interview, I did 20 minutes. 20 minutes and my mind was completely blank. I mean I could not. There was nothing in it. Well, maybe some people would say that's their normal state. I was, I wanted to clear my self to be ready to accept your ideas, to be ready for them in a way that I could say, okay, how would I solve this? How would I use this? So meditation is not an easy thing. And on a habitual basis it's even more challenging. So what do you think is the future? Let's take out your crystal ball. You're going to tell. We're marking this down. It is March of 2019. Tell me what's the Crystal Ball show?

Well, that's why I call it the Crystal Ball.

Not the Magic 8 ball, but the Crystal Ball.

Let me use your terminology as being a utopian viewer or you want to call it. I see more and more companies using less and less hierarchy because they get more and more efficient to the fact that people are getting more and more respect and responsibility to take back these two words in their respective positions. So I see this happening. I see that we will create environments which will accelerate the change of companies faster and faster and where we will find solutions also through technology so that we have this exchange between these different organizations who drive this change. And I see that that will work out. I see also see that this is linked to a general. Rise of awareness in people. Now you touched base on the dystopian view of the earth and Brexit and Trump and whatever at the beginning of our interview and I didn't want it to drill dwell into that. But that's only the one, only the thing we hear on the news. Go out and talk to people. I talked about personal development and meditation 20 years ago and I talk about the same thing today. I can tell you there's a big difference. Like 20 years ago, definitely everybody was taking me as a cultish guy and actually I stopped talking about for years because I just was. Thank you. You are, I'm not dogmatic but culture, I don't know how we can combine that one. But, but I was taken and, and now today you, you think there is no day where not to talk to somebody new and talk about that. And they're not taking this badly. They just say oh that's interesting. That's interesting.

And yet I've shared with you at the same time, if we went back and there, there's troubles with going back in time because there were bad things that happened and good things that happen at all time.

Yes.

Is that we as today. I, I often see people are using these tools to fend off the challenges that they're facing every day. And this is their way of escapism so that they can manage during the day. And it's a counterintuitive. You should not be using hip hop meditation to make your day better. You should be making your day better and therefore you have a higher quality meditation.

I think this, this goes both ways. Anything you do like anything anything you do in too much is that binge watching of series on Netflix is It sex, is it alcohol, is it whatever? Or meditation is. It can be only a thing to numb yourself from reality around you. Yes, absolutely. I think we have to be.

I don't even say it's too. I don't even say it's too much is. I know people who say, I've had such a horrible day, I need to go home and meditate, or the work that I do is so challenging, I need to go home and meditate. And they don't get back on their emails. They're overloaded. And I. I'm not sure. One of the challenges that I have in my head right now is that we often keep track of the situations that fit the model that we would like to say. Yet the challenges that individuals are facing around the globe might be causing meditation to be accepted as a means to counteract that. And so at the same time, when we think about decentralized organizations, let's say that there are 10,000 in the world that operate in this, this way. But out of the companies or out of the companies that have not succeeded that disappeared, we don't have any record of the fact that that attempt, that 50,000 might have disappeared because of the attempt. We tend to. It's. I think I shared this with you. I love when people are on stage, they've raised $50 million, they've never been profitable. They're the individual talking about how business should be done. Five years later, they're gone, the business is closed, it didn't work. And then we have another person in the front. We don't tend to take the always those individuals who had those experiences and they failed miserably because they attempted to do what that person on stage has done already. And it's, it's very clear that individuals would rather hear hopeful, inspiring stories than that. Then the stories that really didn't end up working out that way make sense.

I could agree more, couldn't agree more. But maybe coming back to the meditation and people coming home from the workday and saying, I had a horrible day, I have to meditate. But maybe through, through this meditation, they either change their job or change their way of seeing their job, and they will find this calm. So that's why I say that's the hope that it goes both ways.

That's the hope that they have, and that's the hope that I think everybody would like to have.

At least it works for me, I can guarantee you. So I change.

Are you trying to tell me that you meditate before you talk to me, just to calm yourself down is that.

I just do that so that I can go through the hour. Yes.

This is. This has been an interesting call, and I would say it's a good call. I'm challenged with how do I look at organizations today? I don't know if I ended up with some of the answers that I want to hear. Not that was bad interview. It's just that I. My mind, as you know, races to say, how do you create these type of environments? Because the data still comes back from 20 years ago, from 10 years ago this year, that people don't enjoy where they work. And I don't think that. And this expression is one that I do not use often. The needle has not moved. So given the needle has not moved, I would love to hear or know that in the future, it would be nice to know that there's a little bit more of a utopianism. That future.

That's what I want.

That's what you wanted, and that's why we're working together. My man, my friend. Isn't that amazing? We connected. We connected just anybody. A friend of ours connected us from Luxembourg and from Hong Kong. And he said, the two of you need to talk. And we have not stopped. So this was a great interview. Thank you very much, Marco, for being on the line. And I want to thank all of you for taking the time out of your busy day to listen in. I do hope from my heart that you learned something today, that you were challenged in a different way and that some way, shape or form, you feel that your life and the lives of other have improved by taking a few minutes to listen in on a conversation that has a different perspective than you might have when you started. One of my sayings, or the sayings that I've always lived by is you can't fix yesterday. You can only create tomorrow. And that's why the name of the program is Redefining Tomorrow. That said, I'd love to connect with any of you listening. You can connect to me@DavidGoldsmith.com you can connect on Instagram, @MrDavidGoldsmith. You can connect on Twitter and at David Goldsmith and the obvious, you can find me on LinkedIn, it's David Allen Goldsmith. You can find Facebook, I'm there. You'll find me. For everybody, I'm David Goldsmith and thank you for listening.