Are you our next business leader (m/f)?

Participium is on the lookout for two business leaders, for the recently created venture Idlegcy, and for Funky & C°, the new company that we are about to create to complete the branch that now holds the product company FunkyTime.

What is a business leader?

A business leader leads a business. Focus is on clients (and the adding of value to them) and people (and the motivation to lead them towards adding value for clients). Leading is inspirational, not hierarchical. We don’t like a boss at all. We like coaches and leaders.

What is important before considering to apply/forward?

You (or the person to whom you would consider to forward this post) should really like the idea of setting up an organization that creates a self-steering responsible culture. Results are important. Trust too. Passion even more.

Looks interesting (for the person you have in mind)?

• Here is the Idlegcy blog post for the business leader that is going to grow the company that has the technology to ensure all online accounts of a person are closed when a person dies.
• And here is the Funky & C° blog post for the business leader who wants to sketch the business plan for this new venture together with us, and then make that business become true.

Thank you for considering and sharing.

We are looking for a business leader (m/f) for Funky & C°

About Funky & C°

Funky & C° is on the drawing board, and we are looking for a business leader who wants to help us design, create, and start Funky & C°, the final corner stone of our “Funky” branch of companies.

Funky & C° wants to help services-focused companies, that are now introducing new ways of organizing and structuring their operations. Funky & C° wants to develop the software tools, dashboards, and cockpits that are required to allow teams to self-steer. Todays preferred sectors for Funky & C° are engineering & architecture, ICT, consulting, legal & finance, R&D services, marketing services — but of course, while drafting the business plan, we might discover that there are better market segments.

What’s so new? This kind of self-steering support software is far away from the classic ERP systems. That’s why a lot of modern companies are now basing their internal information flows on Excel. We want to provide them with much much better tools, and gradually create our own portfolio of software products that are needed for the self-steering organizations of tomorrow.

So now, we are looking for someone who wants to take the lead from the very early stage of the creation of this company.

Could that be you?

Do you want to start from (almost) scratch? Do you have the guts, the experience, the attitude, and the skills to create and run a venture and make our joint vision come true? The business leader of Funky & C° is not standing alone. He or she reports to the investment company (Participium), and is supported by our company creator Jan Lagast to build a great services team and design a future-oriented software portfolio.

We have two products already in another company of the Funky branch, and that’s where we also have a some early-stage clients. This allows you to scale-up much faster and run positive on a shorter term, than you would be able with a start-from-totally-zero start-up. Even more, we have the network to get in touch with self-steering companies, from day one, and there is Forte, that is also addressing your potential clients with a portfolio of advisory services that urge many companies to switch to self-steering mode.

About the role of the business leader

The business leader will first help us design the business plan, check the market, and assemble the first team. After the creation of the company, he or she ensures the Funky & C° potential reaches the clients and keeps our small team focused on making the promises come true. After a while, the business leader will hire more commercial people (in more countries), grow the team, and imply more and more partners to get more and more clients motivated. But first, we want you to develop a battle plan together with us and start rolling up the sleeves.

Are you an inspiring leader or a classic manager?

Our investors at Participium are promoting self-steering organizations. So they want the company Funky & C° to be organized accordingly, and proof that self-steering brings results. That means there is no classic hierarchy, no command & control structure, no boss-to-boss-to-boss reporting. We want the individual co-worker to be a team player and understand his or her responsibility in relation to the purpose of Funky & C° – leading to all of the collaborators to love their work.

Do you have the right experience?

You’d have to feel at ease with the combination of advisory services and IT project management in a services and knowledge worker business environment. You’d better also love adopting modern technologies of the web, such as web services, blockchain, and APIs. We need a hands-on start-up mentality at first, but beware, we also need you to grow the team and the business towards financial profit on a short term.

Sounds interesting? Get in touch with paul.indekeu [at] participium.com.

My search for participation and a self-steering organizational structure

Today, prof. Jan De Visch has given me the opportunity to tell my own story. My 50 years of searching. Searching for the right company structure to make people love their work. It has not been an easy search. Today, it seems bon ton to dislike Taylor and classic company hierarchies, but that was not the case when I started my business experience.

Over the years, I have been working on many of the levels of maturity that are described by Frederic Laloux in his book “reinventing organizations”. Red — the maturity level of the medieval lord who is the dominant boss of a group of power seekers — is great when you need a high quality and a high control over a very small team. Great for fast start-up, yet weak for scaling-up. That’s when the “amber” level can be much more successful. In amber, everyone has a rank because he or she got to that rank. Great for creating large churches and armies, but not great for output-driven organizations. We tried some of that by allocating people to a rank, but soon we discovered there were more ranks than people. Orange works better for knowledge workers, since that level rewards people for their merits. This is thé level for Industry 3.0 companies in which bosses design the organization and have workers do the job that was designed for them. Not a great system for knowledge work, though. The boss cannot be everywhere controlling everyone’s work. We experimented with ‘green’, by introducing co-ownership and having people feel they own part of the business. That worked much better. We had our people take responsibilities over the client’s results and take team responsibilities over the long term. But, when times were bad or changes were needed, this level of maturity stalls the company. So, I almost went back to “red” out of frustration, until I read about the color “teal”. And that’s where I felt back on track. This is the organizational concept that we are now looking into. And that’s why the journey organized by the Argonauts is so important for us.

Self-steering looks promising, but we are not there yet. We have a lot to discover, learn, and try. But what I already learned, is that there is no text-book always-right model for company organization. I also discovered self-steering is more wrongly than rightly understood. Self-steering is about getting and taking responsibility. It has nothing to do with ‘go as you please’. Although there is no daily boss or chief in a self-steering organization, for everyone from cleaning lady to general manager, there are much more people to take into account and ask for their opinion than ever before.