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The term liberated company, popularized by the book Freedom, Inc. [1] by Brian M. Carney and Isaac Getz, refers to an organization which, according to the authors, unleashes employees' initiative and responsibility by treating them as adults.
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The term liberated company, popularized by the book Freedom, Inc. [1] by Brian M. Carney and Isaac Getz, refers to an organization which, according to the authors, unleashes employees' initiative and responsibility by treating them as adults.
The notion of liberated or "freedom-form" (F-Form) company was further formalized by Isaac Getz in his 2009 academic article "Liberating Leadership: How the initiative-freeing radical organizational has been successfully adopted" in California Management Review, in which he describes it "as an organizational form that allows employees complete freedom and responsibility to take actions they decide are best". [2] He specifies that, like architects who define human-built structures (for example a bridge) based on functions (allowing passage over an obstacle) rather than structural features, the freedom-form company is similarly defined by its function (to enable freedom and responsibility of initiative) rather than a model. [3] According to the author, to facilitate employee freedom and responsibility, corporate liberation requires transformation—guided by the company's leader—of organizational practices that prevent them. For example, corporate liberation involves a drastic reduction of internal controls, rules, and regulations. Liberating leadership is an essential part of building liberated companies. Liberated companies are based on a business philosophy, not a model, of freedom and responsibility concepts. This is intrinsically linked to liberating leadership, a type of transformational leadership, needed to articulate this philosophy within the human context of each company to build its unique organizational form. [4] [5] In this sense, valuable and useful practices for one liberated company would not necessarily be suitable for another. [6] Similar to the diversity in the organizational forms adopted by these companies, there is no standard path or method to build them. [7] Each liberating leader co-designs, together with the employees, their unique liberation path. Further on, the liberating leader maintains and evolves this organizational form that they helped build.
The influences most cited by liberating leaders who have built freedom and responsibility-based organizational forms are:
Deployed since 1958 in many countries, it has as pioneers companies such as W.L. Gore & Associates, [10] [11] Avis (in the 1960s), USAA, Sun Hydraulics, Quad Graphics, Richards Group, [12] IDEO, Chaparral Steel, Harley Davidson, and Vertex Inc. in the United States, FAVI, SEW Usocome, and Bretagne Atelier in France, SOL in Finland and Radica Games in China. [13] These pioneers have been extremely successful both in human and economic terms for several decades and with several succeeding CEOs. [1] [14] [15] Despite that, until the 2010s, the phenomenon of freedom- and responsibility-based companies remained marginal. [16] [2]
Since the beginning of the 2010s, a growing number of companies of all sizes and sectors, such as Decathlon, Michelin, [17] Airbus, [18] Kiabi, and Poult [19] have entered corporate liberation. Organizations in the non-profit sector, such as two Belgian ministries, the Social Security and a few municipalities in France, have also joined this movement. [20] According to the Belgian business daily L'Echo, 8% of companies have entered corporate liberation. [21] The world region with the highest absolute number of liberated companies is France and Belgium where the phenomenon is called entreprise libérée. Their number is estimated in hundreds and they have been abundantly covered in press, [22] [23] [24] TV and radio, [25] [26] [27] [28] and even in a comic book. [29]
A number of leaders have developed organizational philosophies highly compatible with liberated companies: Herb Kelleher in SouthWest Airlines, Ricardo Semler in Semco in Brazil, Vineet Nayar in HCL Technologies in India, David Marquet on a US nuclear submarine, [30] Michel Hervé in Groupe Hervé in France, [31] Henry Stewart in Happy Ltd. In United Kingdom, Jos de Blok in Buurtzorg Nederland, [32] [33] Gabe Newell in Valve, Matt Perez in Nearsoft. [34]
Some companies, such as Avis, Harley Davidson, and Radica Games, sought to be liberated and later reverted to traditional command-and-control organizational forms. Since liberated organizational forms are maintained by company heads, if they are replaced by new ones who aren't liberating leaders, the liberated form can quickly dissolve, despite declining performance. Change of ownership can also put a limit to corporate liberation by imposing strategies incompatible with liberated companies' typical values such as trust, fairness, and respect.
A vice president, also director in British English, is an officer in government or business who is below the president in rank. It can also refer to executive vice presidents, signifying that the vice president is on the executive branch of the government, university or company. The name comes from the Latin term vice meaning "in place of" and typically serves as pro tempore to the president. In some countries, the vice president is called the deputy president. In everyday speech, the abbreviation VP is used.
Succession planning is a process and strategy for replacement planning or passing on leadership roles. It is used to identify and develop new, potential leaders who can move into leadership roles when they become vacant. Succession planning in dictatorships, monarchies, politics, and international relations is used to ensure continuity and prevention of power struggle. Within monarchies succession is settled by the order of succession. In business, succession planning entails developing internal people with managing or leadership potential to fill key hierarchical positions in the company. It is a process of identifying critical roles in a company and the core skills associated with those roles, and then identifying possible internal candidates to assume those roles when they become vacant. Succession planning also applies to small and family businesses where it is the process used to transition the ownership and management of a business to the next generation.
Historically there have been differences among investigators regarding the definition of organizational culture. Edgar Schein, a leading researcher in this field, defined "organizational culture" as comprising a number of features, including a shared "pattern of basic assumptions" which group members have acquired over time as they learn to successfully cope with internal and external organizationally relevant problems. Elliott Jaques first introduced the concept of culture in the organizational context in his 1951 book The Changing Culture of a Factory. The book was a published report of "a case study of developments in the social life of one industrial community between April, 1948 and November 1950". The "case" involved a publicly-held British company engaged principally in the manufacture, sale, and servicing of metal bearings. The study concerned itself with the description, analysis, and development of corporate group behaviours.
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) or corporate social impact is a form of international private business self-regulation which aims to contribute to societal goals of a philanthropic, activist, or charitable nature by engaging in, with, or supporting professional service volunteering through pro bono programs, community development, administering monetary grants to non-profit organizations for the public benefit, or to conduct ethically oriented business and investment practices. While once it was possible to describe CSR as an internal organizational policy or a corporate ethic strategy similar to what is now known today as Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG); that time has passed as various companies have pledged to go beyond that or have been mandated or incentivized by governments to have a better impact on the surrounding community. In addition national and international standards, laws, and business models have been developed to facilitate and incentivize this phenomenon. Various organizations have used their authority to push it beyond individual or even industry-wide initiatives. In contrast, it has been considered a form of corporate self-regulation for some time, over the last decade or so it has moved considerably from voluntary decisions at the level of individual organizations to mandatory schemes at regional, national, and international levels. Moreover, scholars and firms are using the term "creating shared value", an extension of corporate social responsibility, to explain ways of doing business in a socially responsible way while making profits.
Thomas J. Peters is an American writer on business management practices, best known for In Search of Excellence
In Search of Excellence is a book written by Tom Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr. First published in 1982, it sold three million copies in its first four years, and was the most widely held monograph in the United States from 1989 to 2006. The book explores the art and science of management used by several companies in the 1980s.
Sustainability reporting refers to the disclosure, whether voluntary, solicited, or required, of non-financial performance information to outsiders of the organization. Generally speaking, sustainability reporting deals with information concerning environmental, social, economic and governance issues in the broadest sense. These are the criteria gathered under the acronym ESG.
A flat organization is an organizational structure with few or no levels of middle management between staff and executives. An organizational structure refers to the nature of the distribution of the units and positions within it, and also to the nature of the relationships among those units and positions. Tall and flat organizations differ based on how many levels of management are present in the organization and how much control managers are endowed with.
W. L. Gore & Associates, Inc. is an American multinational manufacturing company specializing in products derived from fluoropolymers. It is a privately held corporation headquartered in Newark, Delaware. It is best known as the developer of waterproof, breathable Gore-Tex fabrics.
Brian M. Carney is a senior executive at Rivada Networks. He is formerly an editor, journalist and member of the Editorial Board at The Wall Street Journal. From August 2009 until early 2014, he lived in London and served as editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe. He is the coauthor, with Isaac Getz, of Freedom, Inc., published by Crown Business on October 13, 2009. He has won the Gerald Loeb Award for business journalism and the Frederic Bastiat Journalism Prize.
Louis François Armand was a French engineer and senior civil servant who managed several public companies, as well as had a significant role in World War II as an officer in the Resistance. He became the first president of the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) as chair of the Armand Commission from 1958 to 1959 before he was elected to the Académie Française in 1963.
Bertrand Moingeon, was Professor of Strategic Management is Executive Vice-President and Dean for Executive Education and Corporate Initiatives at ESCP Business School and formerly at HEC Paris.
Organizational ethics is the ethics of an organization, and it is how an organization responds to an internal or external stimulus. Organizational ethics is interdependent with the organizational culture. Although it is to both organizational behavior and industrial and organizational psychology as well as business ethics on the micro and macro levels, organizational ethics is neither organizational behavior nor industrial and organizational psychology, nor is it solely business ethics. Organizational ethics express the values of an organization to its employees and/or other entities irrespective of governmental and/or regulatory laws.
The term director is a title given to the senior management staff of businesses and other large organizations.
Holacracy is a method of decentralized management and organizational governance, which claims to distribute authority and decision-making through a holarchy of self-organizing teams rather than being vested in a management hierarchy. Holacracy has been adopted by for-profit and non-profit organizations in several countries. This can be seen as a greater movement within organisational design to cope with increasing complex social environments, that promises a greater degree of transparency, effectiveness and agility.
Open allocation refers to a style of management in which employees are given a high degree of freedom in choosing what projects to work on, and how to allocate their time. They do not necessarily answer to a single manager, but to the company and their peers. They can transfer between projects regardless of headcount allowances, performance reviews, or tenure at the company, as long as they are providing value to projects that are useful to the business goals of the company. Open allocation has been described as a process of self-organization. Rather than teams and leadership arrangements existing permanently in a company, such relationships form as they are needed and disband when they are no longer necessary. Additionally, open allocation implies that projects are not unilaterally created and staffed by executive mandate. Rather, the person forming the project is responsible for convincing others to invest their time, energy, and careers into the effort.
While psychopaths typically represent a very small percentage of workplace staff, the presence of psychopathy in the workplace, especially within senior management, can do enormous damage. Indeed, psychopaths are usually most present at higher levels of corporate structure, and their actions often cause a ripple effect throughout an organization, setting the tone for an entire corporate culture. Examples of detrimental effects include increased bullying, conflict, stress, staff turnover, absenteeism, and reduction in both productivity and social responsibility. Ethical standards of entire organisations can be badly damaged if a corporate psychopath is in charge. A 2017 UK study found that companies with leaders who show "psychopathic characteristics" destroy shareholder value, tending to have poor future returns on equity.
Workplace democracy is the application of democracy in various forms to the workplace, such as voting systems, debates, democratic structuring, due process, adversarial process, and systems of appeal. It can be implemented in a variety of ways, depending on the size, culture, and other variables of an organization.
Ghislain Deslandes is a French philosopher born in Angers (France) on the 16th of August 1970.
Isaac Getz is an author, conference speaker, and currently holds the post of Professor at ESCP Business School. He specializes in the areas of organizational behavior, leadership and organizational transformation and has been instrumental for the corporate liberation movement involving hundreds of companies and institutions.
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