Transcriber: Ariana Bleau Lugo Reviewer: Alessandra Tadiotto
Hi!
In his last years, Albert Einstein said:
"Everything great and truly inspiring
is done by the individual who labors in freedom."
Everything great and inspiring is done
by the individual who labors in freedom.
I want to talk to you today about
how we can work in freedom.
First thing I want to share with you is that I was born and raised in Egypt.
It's not that relevant to this talk,
but these days is really nice to say it out loud.
(Applause)
So I came to the United States 10 years ago
to work for Microsoft.
And as I was getting there I was super-excited,
I expected I'd be working with the brightest people in the world,
solving amazing problems that will solve everything,
and when I got there I was really disillusioned.
I often found myself sitting in rooms
with really smart intelligent people who were bored,
and disengaged, and making PowerPoint presentations.
And I found myself sitting in those meetings sometimes thinking,
nobody wants to be here,
including the guy who called the meeting.
You know what I mean?
So I left Microsoft and went to the non-profit world and thought:
there I'm going to find meaning and engagement,
and really, I found amazing people still there.
Still in second gear.
Something about our work spaces puts people in second gear.
We feel disengaged and dis-empowered in most of our work.
It turns out actually that 3 out of 4 people,
3 out of 4 people in the world feel disempowered and disengaged in their work.
Think about that.
75% of us go to work and don't feel fully alive. Why?
I don't think it's because we don't want to be alive in our work
or because we are not smart enough,
I think it's because the systems that we work in
are completely outdated.
You know, these top-down command and control pyramid structures where
somebody tells somebody else what to do who tells somebody else what to do.
Those were invented hundreds of years ago.
Since then, we've discovered electricity,
we've gone to the moon, we've built the Internet.
We've done some cool things, right?
But we haven't upgraded the agreement with which we're working together.
We live in democracies but we work in dictatorships.
We live in democracies and we work in dictatorships. Yeah.
(Applause)
So, why? That's silly, right?
And that's what I thought to myself.
So, I stepped outside of the work world
and joined with about forty other people
and we started to look at what would a new ageement of work look like.
What would it look like to just think out loud?
What would a new company look like that's not based on these pyramids?
I have nothing against pyramids, by the way.
(Laughter)
The first time I thought, because I'm a software engineer,
I'd looked at the open-source software community.
Now the thing about open-source software, you probably know
it is the people who make Firefox and Wikipedia, and things like that.
It's an amazing community, not just because they are geeks
but because these engineers have figured out
how to work together freely, without managers.
They figured out how to have several thousand people
write billions of lines of code to create billions of dollars worth of amazing software
that runs 60% of the Internet without a single person
telling somebody else what to do.
They figured out how to be fully alive in what they're passionate in
and scale, and actually produce value.
I thought to myself, why don't we take the same principles of the open-source software world
and apply it to the conventional workplace?
And so, with these forty people, some of them millennials,
we got together and we created the open enterprise model.
We built the software to support companies and organizations to work in these ways.
And I want to share with you how this works, some of the principles of it.
So the first principle of an open enterprise is
there is no fixed structure.
There're no leaders, prescribed leaders, there are no job titles.
Everybody has the same job title, human being.
It's true.
And I'm not talking about a flat structure, by the way,
because that doesn't scale very well,
I'm talking about hierarchy, but a much more intelligent,
dynamic, functional hierarchy,
where people move up and down depending on the situation.
If you think about a team that you worked in that was highly functional
nobody was leading all the time.
People stepped in when they felt inspired or felt they could lead
and stepped back and let somebody else lead at the right time.
This is how we normally want to work.
But this is not how our structures work.
In the real world our best example of that is a company W. L. Gore.
This company -- they make GORE-TEX. They've 9,000 employees.
And only one job title: associate.
If you work at Gore you're an associate and you own part of the company.
No vice-presidents, no managers, nothing like that.
There are leaders, but if you're going to be a leader that means
that a group of associates has voted you in willingly.
They can take that vote away immediately, which keeps you accountable,
and actually puts real leaders in place.
They're doing pretty well.
They are the number one voted place in Fortune Magazine to work in America,
and they make 2,5 billion dollars a year.
It's an amazing company.
The second principle of an open enterprise is transparency.
In an open enterprise everything is transparent.
I mean salaries, financials, communications, every meeting has an open door.
If you show up to a meeting than you belong in that meeting.
And a lot of companies today are adopting this.
Cutting edge companies like Zappos and Hulu and Groupon --
these companies have open book management.
They've decided to make employee culture the most important thing.
And they are kicking butts doing it.
And they have this open book management
where anybody has access to all numbers any time they want.
And because human beings want to have information we feel trusted,
and we start to take ownership of our community, and ownership of our work,
and transparency is a really good step towards doing that.
The last principle I want to share with you about how an open enterprise works
is that it has a true meritocracy of ideas.
What that means is every idea is judged
based on the merit of the idea itself
not on who the idea came from.
A really good example of this in action
is this company WD-40, you know, they make those oils,
I never use it, but it's a really great company,
and a few years ago they were in a hard place, a very hard financial spot,
and the CEO Garry Ridge, instead of just firing a bunch of people,
sends out a memo to everybody, saying:
"Look, we're in a really tough spot, we're a 100 million dollars short this year,
I'm not going to fire anybody, but I want you to send me
all the ideas you have about how we can cut costs."
And what happened next was amazing.
Everybody in the company started sending all these ideas, big and small ideas,
a ton of them got implemented and WD-40 saved
280 million dollars that year and nobody got fired.
An open enterprise goes a step further
and doesn't just say anybody can suggest ideas,
the ideas actually are voted on by anybody,
and the good ideas bubble up to the top and get implemented.
That's how open-source software works.
We should take this to our real world.
I don't have all the answers about how these new structures of work are going to work.
I don't think anybody does, but what I do want to convey to you
is that this is already happening.
These old structures are already crumbling around us,
and we need to invent these new structures.
The problems Simon talked about are real and they are here.
If we're going to solve these problems we have to invent intelligent ways,
intelligent ways of aggregating human effort, so we can build and work together for future,
where we'll all truly labor in freedom. Thank you.
(Applause)