Matt K. Parker - A Radical Enterprise: Pioneering the Future of High-Performing Organizations

Praise for A Radical Enterprise

A Radical Enterprise is a masterclass on the future of business. Parker inspires us with practical solutions for building open, decentralized organizations and shows us how to create the conditions for teams of any size to find meaning and fulfillment in their work.

Aaron Pava , Chief Experience Officer (CXO),
CivicActions

This book will challenge you! Matt K. Parker explores the often surprising frontiers of how organizations can run. He looks at thirteen businesses that have chosen to adopt organizational philosophies that may seem alien and strange but when presented with fifty years of scholarly research are suddenly not so crazy after all.

Gene Kim , Author, Researcher, and
Founder of IT Revolution

Parker has had a front row seat as many organizations sought to empower their teams and become more nimble and effective. He has seen what works and what doesnt. This book will give you the often surprising answers. It turns out that making your organization more powerful depends on senior leaders giving up their power. Parker does a brilliant job explaining why that not only works but is necessary to create more effective and more enjoyable workplaces.

Paul Gaffney , Chief Technology and
Supply Chain Officer, Kohls

Management as we know it is a century-old, outdated technology; we need to radically reinvent how we organize and collaborate to rise to the challenges of our time, and this book offers some powerful tools for that journey.

Brian J. Robertson , author of Holacracy: The New Management
System for a Rapidly Changing World

Matt takes years of intuition and learnings from the bleeding edge of hypergrowth software organizations and codifies them in a framework that applies to any knowledge-work business. Its an exciting glimpse into the future of work we should all strive to achieve.

Ross Hale , CEO, Artium

A Radical Enterprise is a very important work and deserves to receive a very wide readership. It is organized around what makes up the foundation of radical collaboration: team autonomy, managerial devolution, deficiency gratification, and candid vulnerability. The author gives many real-world examples of radically collaborative companies practicing these imperatives.

Even after a few years of practicing and studying the field of radical collaboration, I was surprised by some of the statistics. For example, 98% of employees are authentically dedicated, 97% are deeply accountable, and 97% are fully responsible for their work and actions.

What I found most refreshing about this book is that it speaks to what is key and important to becoming a radically collaborative workplace and producing tangible results. And its about how our world is going to metamorphosize from a system of domination to one of collaboration. Kudos to Matt Parker!

Matt Perez , cofounder of Nearsoft and
coauthor of RADICAL Companies

25 NW 23rd Pl, Suite 6314

Portland, OR 97210

Copyright 2022 by Matt K. Parker

All rights reserved, for information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, IT Revolution Press, LLC, 25 NW 23rd Pl., Suite 6314, Portland, OR 97210.

First Edition
Printed in the United States of America
27 26 25 24 23 22 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Cover design by Devon Smith Creative
Book design by Devon Smith Creative

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021948594

ISBN: 9781950508006
eBook ISBN: 9781950508020
Kindle ISBN: 9781950508037
Web PDF ISBN: 9781950508044
Audio download: 9781950508013

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases or for information on booking authors for an event, please visit our website at www.ITRevolution.com.

A RADICAL ENTERPRISE

Contents

To Charlie, Ruby, and River,
and to the radically collaborative future you may inherit.

Preface

E very book begins as an idea, and every idea is born in a time and place. So I guess you could say that this book was born in a basement in the year 2001. At that time, I had just started my first programming internship within the IT department of a major hospital system in Dallas, Texas. On my first day, my manager met me in the lobby and led me to an elevator, which, to my surprise, took us not up to where I imagined I would be working but down to the basement, where we wound our way through a subterranean maze of flickering fluorescent lights and cinder block corridors until we arrived at an unmarked door that my manager opened while saying, Welcome to IT.

Behind that unmarked door stood a cramped and dim cubicle farm populated by programmers and IT professionals and lit by the pale glow of terminals. The carpet was gray, as were the chairs and cubes. There were no windows, no plants, no decorations, and, most unsettling of all, no noise save the tap-tap-tapping of fingers on keys and the whirring of a tape archive system emanating from an even deeper chamber within this veritable dungeon.

To say that this environment was oppressive would be an understatement. This was the stereotype we all joke about, the impersonal corporate hierarchy, but here it was made real as it literally and figuratively bore down on the knowledge workers toiling away underground, creating and maintaining the software and systems that the hospitals ran on.

This was where intense and unyielding managers drove impossible deadlines with unrealistic scopes. Where IT professionals suffered long hours in quiet desperation. Where passion, innovation, and creativity were slowly yet unrelentingly drained from the workforce and replaced by disengagement, mistrust, and apathy.

I was young and inexperienced at the time. I knew nothing about the theoretical underpinnings of this way of working or the empirical evidence against its financial efficacy. Nonetheless, I was convinced of three things:

1.This way of working is bad for people.

2.This way of working is bad for business.

3.This way of working is a choice.

Thats not to say that I thought this way of working was due to the choice of any one individual. Rather, I intuited that nothing about this way of structuring and organizing knowledge work was necessary.

It is not individual choice but the collective sum of present and past choices that has resulted in this self-replicating system of work that dehumanizes people, sabotages organizational performance, and diminishes creativity and innovation. We have collectively taken a world so filled with the potential for joy, fulfillment, and meaning and replaced it with an encumbrance of stress and strife. What I guessed then but now know is that we can make any sort of world we want, if only we disentangle ourselves from the historical morass that we have all inherited and find a new path forward for human sociality.

Of course, back in 2001 I had no idea what that new path might look like, so I spent the next ten long years working in a series of dehumanizing environments until a small but reputable consulting company, Pivotal Labs, invited me to interview with them. I had used their opinionated product management software, Pivotal Tracker, for years, but I knew next to nothing about how Pivotal Labs actually worked. Since I was employed by a large hierarchical enterprise at the time, in which the daily experience of work was akin to swimming upstream through a river of mud, I jumped at the opportunity to interview somewhere else.