Unboss

By Jacob Bøtter and Lars Kolind

Unboss means the opposite of boss. Bosses work with power, unbosses with values. Bosses make decisions and issue orders, unbosses inspire people to think, decide and pursue a common purpose. Unbosses focus more on effect than on profit, but nevertheless often end up earning more than conventional bosses. Unboss refers to a person (the unboss), a philosophy (unboss), and a process (to unboss). It turns the conventional understanding of management and work on its head, and transforms limited companies into unlimited movements. It makes employees into partners, renders offices and fixed working hours superfluous, and turns customers into sales and service staff. @boetter and @kolind are out to unboss companies, associations and public-sector institutions – and nothing will ever be the same again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9788740007961

Book preview

2012

We live in an era and a world when the old industrial mindset is becoming more and more anachronistic by the day. Yet, it still makes up all of the methods, traditions, conventions and rules used to run companies and organisations. This mindset may have been extremely successful for the last century, but these are hard times for conventional companies based on it. Established companies in the Western world find their growth slowly grinding to a halt. Job satisfaction is also on the wane. People are crying out for a new purpose, for better reasons for doing what they do.

No one saw it coming. No one knows what’s next. – the last words of the modern era, right there.

– Ben Hammersley , 30 October 2011 http://j.mp/hammersley

We believe that these same people will enjoy immense job satisfaction and find their work meaningful in the unbossed companies of the future – organisations with a purpose, companies that resemble social movements. They will find out what it’s like when every colleague is a partner, not just a fellow employee. They will play many different roles in the organisation, ranging from modest contributions to participation in joint development processes and to hard, full-time work over a number of years. The companies of the future will generate far more value than the conventional businesses of today, while affording the staff even greater opportunities to generate wealth and customise their jobs to suit their individual requirements. Unbossed organisations will offer employees new opportunities for personal development and allow them to take initiative, including seeking out new business opportunities and sharing in the value generated. The financial return will improve for all of the stakeholders, not just for the owners.

At present, people are often motivated by a strong desire to make money. Unfortunately, this has resulted in a cynical form of capitalism with a limited understanding of anything but money and power. We see too many companies with a narrow-minded tunnel vision focused on return on investment, which puts both individuals and companies under heavy pressure. Our planet and its resources are also stretched to the limit. This type of company will be the big losers in the future. They will be left behind by unbossed or unlimited organisations that will benefit from their ability to bring stakeholders together, united behind a common purpose and refreshingly free of the bureaucracy to which we have become accustomed in companies driven by the traditional industrial mindset.

Too many companies have a narrow-minded focus on return on investment.

ETHICS NEED TO IMPROVE IN AN ERA OF SOCIAL MEDIA

Students at business schools were once taught that the company with the lowest price per product enjoyed a competitive advantage and would win out in the end. This was the logic behind decades of ever-larger production units, divisions and companies, greater automation and more outsourcing. We are convinced that, in the future, this type of company will face stiff opposition from companies they don’t even know exist yet. Companies that not only offer the same products at lower prices but will change entire industries. This new competition will be driven by a common purpose that extends far beyond mere return on investment.

The American Founding Father encapsulated this principle very concisely with the motto do well by doing good, meaning that organisations will prosper if they have a positive effect on the world around them. They will be more profitable despite putting a greater purpose before profit.

How come? you might ask. Why has it suddenly become unacceptable to run a business solely for profit? Well, it hasn’t really. It’s just that there are better strategies out there. Here’s one simple reason: the internet and social media make socially responsible organisations more visible and they are rewarded accordingly. Conversely, unethical behaviour is punished to an unprecedented extent. Who would you rather work for? An organisation that wastes energy and pollutes its surroundings, or one that takes care of the environment?

Conventional companies mired in an industrial mentality chase ever-decreasing profit margins in more and more competitive markets. Sometimes this leads to unethical behaviour, but one of the wonderful consequences of the global impact of digital social media is how difficult it is nowadays to run a business that pays scant respect to its stakeholders and fails to act in a sustainable fashion. The risk of exposure has multiplied – which represents excellent progress in itself – but it also means that companies are forced to change their behaviour out of pure necessity. If they don’t, they lose. There is simply so much more to gain by doing something good – for your customers and for society as a whole – than by improving efficiency by 5–10%.

If the company’s sole raison d’être is shareholder value, it can’t rely on customers, suppliers and government agencies as allies. If, however, it focuses on making a positive difference for customers and communities, everybody will want to help, which often leads to higher sales and bigger profits in the longer run.

Don’t expect conventional management methods to persuade customers, employees, suppliers and official agencies to participate, contribute and share.

If you want to take the latter path, you’ll need a completely different mindset and very different skills from those you have today. Don’t expect conventional management methods to persuade customers, employees, suppliers and official agencies to participate, contribute and share. You can’t just order people to be positive about your organisation. But if you have a good case, then you can engage them and use both financial and non-financial incentives as motivators. In a situation where you can’t just boss people about, individuals have greater freedom to choose how they will perform their duties. In order to create space for individual commitment and creativity, you need a looser, more flexible structure.

Unboss is an invitation to expand the knowledge base for the work that your organisation is involved in and look at more than just technical skills. If a company that used to concentrate on developing and selling excellent cars switches its focus to providing cheap, safe and environmentally friendly passenger transport, it will need a more wide-ranging skill set. You can’t rely on technology alone – you also need, for example, to understand the social and cultural traditions of the markets in which you operate. Not all of these skills will be available in-house, but they can be acquired by inspiring all sorts of people to get behind a cause, a purpose – and some of them won’t, even in the most informal sense, be employed by the company.

If our ambition is to achieve success by making a positive difference in this new world, then we need a different type of leader. It is in this context that the unboss as a person enters the picture.

We are only in charge when we are willing to let others take charge.

– Simon Sinek 27 March 2012 http://j.mp/chargesinek

The unboss is more servant than master. The unboss is somebody who makes things possible instead of issuing orders. A leader rather than a boss. A designer rather than a producer.

THE UNBOSSING PROCESS HAS ALREADY STARTED

We’re not just speculating wildly here, or describing a distant future. It has already begun, even if it’s only a few companies in each industry. So far. New types of leaders are emerging. They are humble, they know how limited their own knowledge is, but also how limited their company’s knowledge is. They see the necessity of contact with the outside world if they want to succeed as a company. And when we think of a successful company, we don’t think of success in a limited, financial sense, but in the sense that the company has a significant, positive effect on the world. Or, as the economist Umair Haque puts it: The first step in the great change is a definition of success that goes beyond ‘the product’. It is culturally conditioned. We have not taken that step yet.

We think we’re on the cusp of taking the step now. It will be done by a new type of company, which we call the unlimited corporation, in contrast to the traditional limited corporation or company.

An unlimited company is organised in a radically different way to the traditional industrial hierarchy. The people who were once managers or members of staff will no longer just think of themselves as employees, but as co-workers or partners. They will not only work for wages, but for the cause. Some will be employees as we know them today, but many will join in because they are committed to the work, despite their link to the company possibly being far less formal than it has normally been in the past.

Looking back at our own experience, and at lessons we have learned from other companies that prioritise cause over profit, there is no doubt in our minds that people involved in the unlimited corporation will enjoy greater job satisfaction and meaning in their work.

Unboss thinking redefines the company as a social network or community with a purpose – in other words, a movement. Such an organisation serves a purpose that is more important than profit and product. It provides safe and environmentally friendly transport rather than just cars, better hearing rather than just hearing aids, entertaining learning rather than just toys. It doesn’t sell products to customers – it creates value along with customers. It doesn’t have employees, just partners. It includes rather than excludes, it is unlimited rather than limited, it focuses on learning rather than relying on the familiar, it’s run by leaders rather than bosses, and it’s based on values rather than power.

The unboss mindset redefines the company into a social network or a community with a purpose – in other words, a movement.

If you are a happy person, you increase the probability of happiness of someone one degree from you by 15% – @Hyperakt at #feastongood

– Mike Karnjanaprakorn 8 June 2011 http://j.mp/mikekarnj

The organisation can be public or private sector, profit-making or non-profit, large or small, local or global, because its strength is based on co-operation, which has no limits other than those defined by the purpose.

DECOUPLING THE PUBLIC SECTOR FROM BUREAUCRACY

The public sector, as we know it in most Western countries, is a special case and in serious need of change. It is stifled by bureaucracy. The battle is all about increasing efficiency and productivity, but the methods have, without much success, been borrowed from private companies. New Public Management has reached its limit. The rigid control of all aspects of work leaves employees demotivated and with no sense of purpose.

Our dream is to tear down this bureaucracy. We believe that unbossing the public sector would free up a huge amount of innovation and creativity, and that the individuals involved would gain a deeper understanding of the purpose behind their work.

We see many signs that the time has come for change. This is especially true for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Many of them are under pressure from global giants capable of producing goods more cheaply and transferring knowledge from one part of the world to the other. Fortunately, unbossing isn’t such a huge risk for SMEs and they will reap the benefits sooner. It is the large, traditionally run companies that will find it difficult to accept and understand the new mindset that unboss reflects. For these companies, incremental change, division by division, might be a better option – provided they have time to wait. Unfortunately, many just don’t have the time. They will commence the process too late and they run a high risk of failure during the transformation, especially if the employees aren’t fully on board.

All companies and organisations, in both industrialised and developing countries, will need to adopt the new way of thinking. We believe that the transformation has particularly large potential for the developing countries, those not constrained by a 100-year-old conventional tradition, especially emerging economies like Brazil, Russia, India and China. Companies in countries in which the old model prevails, especially Europe and North America, have an even greater need to transform themselves into knowledge-based organisations. But they’re slow. They first need to unlearn the traditional mindset that has been so successful over the past century. The emerging economies can skip this step. They should stop wasting time and resources teaching the outmoded management practices of Europe and North America. The new economies will never win if they copy management principles that were invented more than 100 years ago, under very different circumstances. These countries should, from the outset, adopt a mindset that belongs to the 21st century – just like the developing countries that have skipped investments in landlines and opted instead for wireless communications and mobile phone networks.

In the last 20 years, the number of people living in poverty in China has fallen from 85% to 15.9%

– The QI Elves 21 August 2011 http://j.mp/chinapoverty

Recently, we asked approximately 500 employees in Danish companies about the potential for further value creation if their organisations functioned satisfactorily. About half said that output or value generation could be increased by more than 50%, while 90% predicted that better organisation and management would lead to an increase of at least 15%. If this applies to Denmark, where employees generally express greater job satisfaction than in many other countries, don’t be surprised if the potential is greater elsewhere.

THIS IS THE AGE OF THE UNBOSS

The 20th century was the era of the boss. People like Alfred P. Sloan, Henry Ford and Nelson D. Rockefeller shaped an industrial culture, earned fortunes and contributed to unprecedented prosperity. Bosses analysed, planned, implemented and managed. And they were famous. Multinational companies grew bigger than nation states.

This is still the way things are today, at least on the surface. Companies are bigger than ever – and yet, at the same time, the bureaucracy and business models are more complex than ever. We still adhere to the organisational principles of the boss era, where qualifications and knowledge are compartmentalised, kept in separate silos and rarely allowed to interact.

But beneath the surface, something is happening. Think about how Skype, with more than 500 million customers, is more than ten times larger than the world’s second-largest telecommunications company – without having ten times as many employees. Actually, Skype has almost 100 times fewer employees than the world’s second-largest telecoms company (measured by number of customers). Think of the enormous structural changes taking place in the retail trade, where Amazon outperforms the largest traditional bookshop chains, such as the American company Barnes & Noble. This isn’t exactly the result of bleeding-edge radical thinking, or of decisions by governments or committees. The changes manifest themselves as subversive new business models that challenge a whole swathe of hierarchies in all sorts of industries. The new companies are drastically different from their predecessors. While the existing companies try to respond and adapt to changes, the new companies overtake them on the inside lane.

Impact per employee. Facebook has 600 engineers for 600 million users. Each engineer for a million users.

– Rishad Tobaccowala 18 May 2011 http://j.mp/rishadt

To understand the essence of the changes taking place, we have to consult our history books. Take the automobile industry of 100 years ago as an example. At that time, cars were produced by tradesmen with individual skills. You ordered a vehicle just as you ordered a handmade chair, with specific requirements for materials, design and features. Then, along came an American engineer, Frederick Winslow Taylor, and others like him, and industrial production would never be the same again. Tradesmen in the automobile industry – and in other industries – tried to resist the new ideas, principles and working methods, but to no avail. They lost – and lost big – because they were unable to adapt. We are now entering a similar period of transition.

It took 100 years for industrialisation to make a major breakthrough. It took the internet 25 years to become commercially viable. But it only took Skype about 10 years to build a customer base equivalent to that of Vodafone. Significant changes don’t happen overnight, but the process has accelerated, and there will be both winners and losers. You risk losing if you wait too long or don’t recognise the risks inherent in this kind of major change.

If you carefully observe the structural landscape behind these changes and then stride resolutely forth onto the rough terrain at the right time, you will come out on top. And in more ways than one. You will win, first and foremost, by instilling a genuine sense that the work is meaningful – and the financial benefits will follow. Meaningful work isn’t incompatible with profit. In fact, it is a prerequisite for strong financial performance in the longer term.

FOUR MAJOR OVERLOOKED CHANGES

On the whole, today’s organisations represent a failed management policy, because they have failed to understand that the world is changing fast. This failure would not be worrying if business conditions were stable, as they were in the post-war years.

Four major changes have occurred in the global business environment but most business leaders have failed to realise the serious consequences of them:

Looking for some Friday reading? Next Friday you can read my book, today try The Collapse of Complex Business Models: http://nq.dk/shirky

– Jacob Bøtter 22 October 2010 http://j.mp/complexbiz

We have undergone a period of economic and political change that has led to a more closely integrated global economy in which fewer and fewer activities are physically bound to specific geographical locations.

The complex business models are bankrupt. New competitors emerge from unexpected industries, for example, Apple’s land-grab in the mobile-phone market or Zappos’s success selling shoes online. Nobody should feel safe any longer.

The days are gone when companies only worked for the shareholders, employees did what they were told, and it was possible to keep knowledge in-house. And they’re not coming back.

We have lived through a revolution in information and communication technology. This has created a global landscape on the internet, in which people work together irrespective of time zone or location. There has been a drastic decline in the costs of organising and running a global business.

We have also seen a profusion of social change. People are now far more loyal to their own professional identity than to the organisation that employs them. They are looking for commitment in their work, not just a monthly income. This means that conventional companies find it increasingly difficult to attract and retain the best workers.

The days are gone when companies only worked for the shareholders, employees did what they were told, and it was possible to keep knowledge in-house. And they’re not coming back.

CONVENTIONAL BOSSES MUST CHANGE THEIR MINDSET NOW

Despite these major changes, conventional corporate governance remains completely focused on developing, producing and selling products with the highest possible return on capital/investment in the short term. The conventional company is seen as a money machine, and its employees as cogs in the production process. Sub-contractors and customers are construed as counterparts who have be constantly pressured in order to obtain a lower purchase price or a higher selling price. The focus is on money, the bottom line, profit, investments, risk, assets and liabilities, growth, productivity and key financial data.

Most conventional bosses see employees as robots, as part of a functional hierarchy that uses command and control structures to guarantee stability and planning and to make sure that strictly defined duties are performed. Power is based on position, which in turn creates a constant need for collective bargaining, during which unions defend the employees’ working hours and wages, and employers’ federations seek to ensure the best conditions to make the highest possible profit.

The closer we look at conventional management, the clearer it becomes – the time for change is NOW!

WORTH THINKING ABOUT

Ask yourself:

In business, people can be divided into two camps: those who know and those who learn. The knowledgeable ones claim to have the answers to everything. They might act as if they’re listening but their every action suggests that they think they know best. Examples are legend, and they’re mainly middle-aged and elderly men who have been bosses for a long time.

Learners don’t feel the same need to prove themselves. Instead, they ask questions. They not only try to understand what other people are saying, but are also interested in hearing how and why they reached those conclusions. Often, you will get more out of the learner’s questions than the knower’s lectures. And, of course, the learners also get something out of your deliberations.

Middle age is when your broad mind and narrow waist begin to change places – E. Joseph Crossman

– QuotesBoat 2 November 2011 http://j.mp/quotesboat

The knowers include conventional bosses, who are often recruited precisely because they know a lot about the technical aspects of the organisation they head. They rarely question their own thinking or assumptions about the world. They know better – including when it comes to managing. And this is a problem, because the world is now so complex that neither individuals – nor companies, for that matter – can possibly have all the answers. Management today consists of gathering together a group of people to contribute answers and face up to challenges.

We are well aware that it requires great intellectual effort to question your own mindset in general and your own thoughts on management in particular. And yet this is precisely what we are asking you to do. You’ll probably find that you’ll have to unlearn the very fundamentals of your work as a manager – and, in effect, unlearn an essential part of yourself.

Imagine that you run a medium-sized company. You don’t think you’re getting anywhere, even though you work hard and strive to do everything right. The organisation is making no progress – in fact, it may even be going in the wrong direction. When you try to work out why, you find that you are able to tick all of the main boxes. You like the people in the company. You think that your understanding of the market and your strategy is right on the button, you’ve analysed the competition, your supply chain is well oiled, delivering on time and meeting all your standards, and the logistics run like clockwork. Despite all this, financial performance isn’t satisfactory.

Your search for an explanation becomes increasingly desperate. In search of answers, you study books, talk to shareholders, and implement internal service checks and investigations. You might even hire management consultants to help find the root of the problem. Is organisational change needed? Should you restructure the organisation? Maybe you’ll have to lay off some people and hire others who possess different knowledge and are more open