We would like to share with you a beautiful review of the book Reinventare Le Organizzazioni (Italian edition of Reinventing Organizations) written by Luca Vignaga, CEO of Marzotto Lab, for Monitor, the weekly economic-political magazine of Venezie Post.
“But when will corporate organizational structures change? The word change is used – and perhaps abused – in all phases of our daily lives; the word change that is related to organizations is, on the other hand, very often wished for, but very little realized. It’s true, organizations, by definition, are a very different entity from people. An organization tends to homogenize, define, standardize through roles, procedures and organizational charts the single subjects that belong to it; a person is a whole entity that, as Walt Whitman said, contains multitudes, and is very difficult to synthesize in a precise scheme. The difference between person and organization very often measures the distance between the self and the coercion of selves. So how do we make two such divergent things coexist?
Is this oxymoron at the root of people’s inability to express themselves in corporate structures? This question, seemingly unanswerable, is at the base of the success that the book written by Frederic Laloux, “Reinventing Organizations”, is having all over the world. PeopleRise, a consulting firm founded a few years ago in Padua and which today already has European stature, wanted to introduce it to the Italian market through a skillful translation. The reader should not be frightened by the 495 pages of the manual, because it is a text marked by a rhythm punctuated by different registers – between theory and practice – which are well combined. First of all, it makes an original historical retrospective – through the technique of colors – of the evolution of organizations to arrive at the Teal stage: the Teal organization is a reality in which people learn to detach themselves from their ego and recover an awareness that takes the place of fear; it is a place where the person is put before the organizational perimeter and that, on the contrary to what usually happens, creates the basis for building new organizational formulas.
For Laloux, “it is plausible that in the future the evolutionary purpose, rather than the organization, will become the entity around which people will gather. A specific purpose will draw people and organizations into fluid, shifting constellations, according to the needs of the moment. People will connect in different ways – full-time, part-time, freelance, volunteer – and organizations will join forces or disband, depending on what best serves the purpose at a given time. The boundaries of an organization might be harder to trace, and the very notion of an organization would be less relevant”.
Is this possible or utopian? If it were all theory, we could only stick to the utopia of the possible. Instead, the book has the ability to make a broad recognition of specific individual cases (twelve to be exact) that range from small to large companies. And this is the register that makes the text intuitive, fluid and able to offer several points of reflection and working tools (e.g. salaries and incentives) that Laloux has the ability to regenerate in a different dimension.
The Italian version, moreover, contains an interesting appendix with the experience of a “living organization” such as Mondora (Francesco Mondora’s final definition of the business would alone merit the purchase of the book); a company from Morbegno in Valtellina that has joined the interesting, American-inspired movement called Benefit Corporation (companies that, in addition to the goal of profit, tend to maximize their positive impact on employees, communities and the environment) and which, with the 2016 Stability Law, has also found regulation in Italy.
“Reinventare le organizzazioni” is a text that cannot provide all the adequate answers to such a complex and changing subject, but it does have the ability to trace some valuable trends and is able, both for entrepreneurs and managers, to stimulate innovative solutions to increase individual responsibility, which is more necessary than ever in today’s working world. A book that should be read – at the very same time – by many people, and from different functions, in order to open a debate and build new ways of corporate coexistence.”
Luca Vignaga
Venezia Post – Monitor – January 22, 2017
