Here are links offering a variety of formats to access materials related to Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations.

Text

• The book itself, heartwarmingly available on a “pay what feels right” basis for e-copies. Also available as an audio-book, and (as of July 2016), a new “illustrated version,” much shorter and expressing similar content with the use of clever visuals!
• Book excerpt: “The Future of Management Is Teal.”
• Q&A with Laloux published at InfoQ

Video

• 20-min. video of author’s summary to the Dalai Lama.
• Longer video (1:20) of author presentation.
• Freedom, Inc., a related movement, has a charming 1-minute animated video expressing their core ideas.
• Sort of RSA-style animated video introduction to the stages of this model, 9 minutes.

Pictures

• Slides summarizing some of the book.
• Prezi presentation by Erwin Van Waeleghem, Belgian police commissioner.
• Check out this charming map, apparently written collectively by participants in the Reinventing Organizations f-b group.

Key Resources

1. The Wiki, beautifully described as “a labor of love, the work of a joyful community, dedicated to soulful organizations everywhere coming to life.”
2. Enspiral Network from New Zealand is a leading light: sharing their own governance docs and publishing great articles (such as Rich Bartlett’s piece on “The Vibes Theory of Organisational Design”), in the context of running a DIY social enterprise support network. More recently Rich has posted Resources for decentralised organising:  a mega list of handbooks and toolkits for groups working without top-down management from social movements to workplaces. Speaking of Rich, check out his group The Hum.
3. Corporate Rebels, a Dutch group who started out by visiting teal leaders around the world and writing about their experiences, and eventually launched their own initiatives.
4. Enlivening Edge, an online space for “next-stage innovators,” offers a library, community hub for live conversations via Zoom, and other resources.
5. Leadermorphosis podcast hosted by Lisa Gill on self-management and progressive organisations; each episode features a guest thought leader or practitioner.

Other Useful Stuff

There is an ever-expanding pool of online literature available to pursue learning in this. I aim here to compile some of the most useful links. Suggestions are welcome.

General overviews:

• Beyond the Holacracy Hype – excellent Harvard Business Review synthesis
• What Our 3 Biggest Successes and 2 Biggest Failures Taught Us About Company Culture – another good article from Buffer
• 11 Things You Should Do To Skyrocket Your Employee Engagement and Employee Engagement: The Business Case from Corporate Rebels (Pim & Joost)
• On What We Learned This Year: The 8 Habits Of Highly Progressive Workplaces (from Corporate Rebels)
• Rewriting The Future Of Work: 8 Movements To Watch (from Corporate Rebels)
• Not exactly teal (does not include Wholeness, for example), but a “cousin” with useful family overlap:  The Agility Factor by Thomas Williams, Christopher Worley, and Ed Lawler

Specific topics within teal:

• Self-Management, Job Roles, & Leadership
  • 5 Crucial Competencies for Self-Management by Doug Kirkpatrick at Morningstar Self-Management Institute
  • Misperceptions of Self-Management by Frederic Laloux and similarly, The Fundamental Things People Get Wrong About Self-Management by Corporate Rebels
  • Percolab’s sensible thinking on how they wrote roles, the difference between self-management and participatory management, and generous sharing of governance wiki (wiki only in French so far, English to come?).
  • More on job titles vs. role functions, from Ben Hughes at Blinkist.
  • The End of Leaders, The Rise of Leadership: Chris Clark on how to respond when a self-organizing team makes a critical mistake
  • Why Frontline Employees Should Make All Decisions: 3 options for how to distribute authority
  • Let Your People Choose Their Managers by Henry Stewart of Happy
  • What If the Boss Makes No Decisions? on Donna Reeves’ experience with retail store managers
  • How to Grow Distributed Leadership by Alanna Irving
  • Nimble Leadership by Deborah Ancona, Elaine Backman & Kate Isaacs writing in HBR.  Also a subarticle in same issue, How to Give Your Team the Right Amount of Autonomy.
  • Staff Partners at Zingerman’s (“Lighting a Path to New Ways to Work”) by Ari Weinzweig, anarchist CEO and a teal hero long before Laloux’s book existed.  Ready?  Include a few front-line staff at the top level of organizational decision-making, giving them full equal power to make consensus decisions with existing leadership.
• Guidance by General Principles (Instead of Too Many Rules)
  • Traffic Light Or Roundabout from Henry Stewart of Happy
• Advice Process
  • The Advice Process, admirably outlined by Corporate Rebels relying on direct quotes from progenitor Dennis Bakke.
  • How we make decentralized decisions, with an advice process embedded within clear decision levels at Gini.
  • Very simple write-up with example from Mark Eddleston
• Transparency & Open Culture
  • GrantTree’s page of links on open culture from Daniel Tenner; includes some of the same links as this page, but many others too, and an emphasis on this subject.
  • Open feedback culture helps our organisation learn: great advice on giving feedback by Marit Kile Hartshorn at ustwo.
• Performance Reviews
  • Let’s get rid of annual appraisals and replace them with snapshots from Happy Ltd.
  • Helen Sanderson on team accountability agreements (confirmation practices and more)
• Personal Growth
  • On self-responsibility, from Ruben Kostucki of Makers Academy (European coding bootcamp): “Everything’s a growth opportunity!”
  • Making Business Personal by Kegan, et al.: “Deliberately Developmental Organizations” emphasize coaching and ongoing personal growth of employees.
• Onboarding
  • Asa Jonsson writes on the 5 types of social networks newcomers in organizations need
• Dismissals
  • Now This Happened: A Self-Managing Firing Round by Lennard Toma.
• Compensation
  • Setting your own salaries examples from Hanno and Incentro (also AES) and Makers Academy (general framework and one specific example) and a few others in the UK.
  • Staff sets CEO pay, example from Happy.
  • Another great example from Percolab.
  • Dynamic equity from Encode.
  • Maja Roosjen’s straightforward advice on creating reward systems.
  • Article describing Viisi‘s predictable, transparent pay scale.
  • Good example from Freitag (Swiss maker of upcycled bags)
  • Lovely example from German condom manufacturer Einhorn
  • “New Pay” by Stefanie Hornung, Nadine Nobile and Sven Franke
  • “Remuneration Diamond“:  3 levels of leadership crossed with 3 levels of skill, combined in peer assessments, then tallied by a compensation panel
• Team Budgets
  • Nice example from Bram at Polis of transitioning to empowered budgeting by teams; incidentally Polis is also an important developer in the area of online deliberation, definitely worth checking out if you are interested in that field.
• Setting Targets & Priorities
  • The Case Against Budgets, Forecasts, and Performance Targets by Geoff Roberts. Actually, not the case against them; rather, the case for not spending too much time and energy on it, relying more on a back-of-the-envelope style, and run by the people meeting the targets rather than an executive team.
  • Priority-setting in a human-centred organisation from Loomio, an example of their quarterly off-site day.
• Conversions
  • Lessons From Going Dutch:  Paul Jansen’s excellent, useful reflections on working with UK healthcare teams aiming to emulate Buurtzorg’s success.
  • The challenges of taking an existing organization teal as contrasted with a clean slate: thoughts from Jos de Blok’s role consulting to Britain’s National Health System and horizontal change at bol.com.
  • Conversions by Spanish company K2K Emocionando. Not satisfied with successfully converting the Spanish manufacturing company Irizar, its chief Koldo Saratxaga left to set up an organization to bring other companies through a transition to fully believing in the people who work there. They’ve intervened in over 50 companies, completing a transition in more than half!  Early in their process, employees take a vote, and it only goes forward if 80% or more say yes.  Here are their 10 components, which include a non-negotiable 30% profit-share with employees.
  • Beyond Agile: Why Agile Hasn’t Fixed Your Problems by Jurriaan Kamer: because it’s about deep values and culture change, not methodology and techniques.
• Examples of practices that foster wholeness
  • 1 day a month for everyone to think and innovate together at GCHQ (public sector organization in the UK).
  • Mood board at Haier, so everyone at the factory can be aware of how each person is feeling that day.
  • 10 Ideas for Taking Time at Work to Reflect from Henry Stewart at Happy
• Structuring time differently
  • 16 organisations exploring a four day week

Teal in nonprofits:

• Nonprofit resources for teal, courtesy of the fabulous Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC)
• Interning at a Worker Self-Directed Nonprofit (SELC)

Happy case studies:

• Morning Star Tomato, “First, Let’s Fire All the Managers” by Gary Hamel
• Buffer’s experiment with self-management (company creates software for managing social media)
• The Ready, a consultancy aiming to eat its own dog-food first
• Haier, Chinese appliance manufacturer
• HaiDiLao Hot Pot, 900 restaurants and growing
• Huboo, UK-based alternative to Amazon for fulfillment services
• Holacracy-teal hybrid in action at Center for Courage & Renewal
• August’s State of the Union report for March 2017
• Fitzii Canadian hiring agency, one year in
• UKTV (UK’s biggest multichannel broadcasting company)
• Several companies’ recent transitions by Lisa Gill
• Matt Black Systems in UK (aerospace & engineering company), parts 1, 2 & 3
• TMC in the Netherlands, pioneering an  “employeneurship” model
• Ooo, Patreon’s culture deck, used for onboarding new hires, is publicly posted
• Carpenter Oak builders in UK
• Schuberg Philis in Amsterdam, “This Company Achieves 100% Customer Satisfaction With 0% Managers” by Jurriaan Kamer
• Breman (technical installer in the Netherlands), operating since 1973
• Best Fricken’ Company in India? Inspirational bootstrapping from Susan Basterfield
• u2i (software company with operations in Poland & US) profiled by Corporate Rebels
• iYell, mortgage tech company in Japan
• Makers Academy
• ESBC school in Berlin (also by Lisa Gill)
• Business School Lausanne (BSL)
• Holacracy experiment currently underway within an agency of Washington State government
• Hollands Kroon (Netherlands municipality, pop. 50,000) eliminated 70% of the city code rules “to make [it] a freer and happier place to live”
• Haufe-Umantis employees democratically elect their CEO each year, along with making other important business decisions
• And, of course, Happy Ltd. (British computer training company)
• Beetroot (European IT company)
• Nearsoft, software company in Mexico with 380 staff, described by its cofounder
• P4Q, manufacturer of electronic systems for solar trackers and lots more, based in Spain with additional staff in China & US
• Viisi, a Dutch mortgage advising company
• VkusVill Russian grocer, scaling up in a mere 8 years from nothing to 1,200 stores and 14,000 staff
• Yash Pakka in India, manufacturing compostable tableware
• Transformation at Bosch Power Tools
• And who could resist:  Tony’s Chocolonely, purveyor of slavery-free chocolate bars, has never spent a dollar on advertising

Lists of teal organizations:

• List of evolutionary companies worldwide
• Another list in the article “What’s Going On with Employee Empowerment?“
• And yet another list: 18 Companies That Have Inspired Us To Build A Company That Brings Out The Best In People
• 16 Companies That Don’t Have Managers from Happy’s Henry Stewart
• Corporate Rebels’ Bucket List and additions.

And more:

• Lovely interview with Laloux regarding how he came to write the book.
• Important reminder from Corporate Rebels: Newsflash: There Is No One-Size-Fits-All Model to Happiness At Work.
• Good debate sparked by Corporate Rebels’ post Bursting the Bubble: Teal Ain’t Real, includes substantial comments by Laloux and others.
• Exploration into the intersection of “liberated” organizations (particularly those using Holacracy) with concerns about oppression from Simon Mont at SELC:  Autopsy of a Failed Holacracy: Lessons in Justice, Equity, and Self-Management.
• The Most Dangerous Notion in “Reinventing Organizations” is that these ideas are new. What if they were practiced for centuries by First Nations peoples in California? Great article by Jessica Prentice.
• Good look at Adopting Self-Management: Big Bang Or Baby Steps? by Frank Thun; includes a nice chart of Agile Work-outs.
• Agile at Scale by Rigby, Sutherland, and Noble writing in HBR.
• Inspired review of a well-functioning Holacracy meeting.
• Tragic story of shareholder succession at FAVI.

Other Books

• Better Work Together: How the power of community can transform your business (2018) from Enspiral.
• Going Horizontal: Creating a non-hierarchical organization, one practice at a time (2018) by Samantha Slade.
• Brave New Work: Are you ready to reinvent your organization (2019) by Aaron Dignan.
• Lead Together:  The Bold, Brave, Intentional Path to Scaling Your Business (2020) by Brent Lowe, Susan Basterfield, and Travis Marsh.
• Mooseheads on the Table (2020) by Karin Tenelius & Lisa Gill.
• The Happy Manifesto (2013) by Henry Stewart. Shorter overview covering many of the same topics as Laloux’s book.
• Joy, Inc. (2013) by Richard Sheridan. From the CEO & Chief Storyteller at Menlo Innovations.
• Freedom, Inc. (2009) by Brian Carney & Isaac Getz. Covers some of the same companies as Laloux, others are different, some fun stories.
• An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization (2016) by Robert Kegan, Lisa Lahey, Matthew L. Miller, & Andy Fleming. To flesh out the “wholeness” aspect in an organization’s operations.
• Maverick (1993) by Ricardo Semler: A classic that inspired some of the other businesses included here.
• Working Together (1983) by John Simmons & William Mares. Participatory decision-making and attempts at workplace transformation among American auto manufacturers of the 1970s & ’80s.

For further reading, see the Corporate Rebels book list on their resource page.

Come join!

I am currently organizing a meetup for people in the Eugene, Oregon area who want to get together in person to explore these ideas.