Resources
Episode Transcript
Lisa: Thank you Matt for being a guest on the Leadermorphosis podcast. I’m really excited to talk to you about this topic and about your book, so thanks for being here.
Matt: You’re welcome, thank you.
Lisa: I was reading back over my notes—I took loads of notes when I was reading your book because there are so many great sound bites—and when I was rereading them this afternoon, I thought maybe a good place to open up the conversation is to start where you start in the book, which is with this nice provocation that businesses are broken and they break people. So can you unpack that a bit for us? What does that mean?
Matt: Well, there’s no unpacking needed. You just look around and that’s the system. So what I mean by the system is the world that we live in, and it’s not a conspiracy. There’s not Innovation from outer space getting posted on us without our notice. What that means is that we can undo it all ourselves. And not undo it all because big parts of it are very, very beneficial, but the way that businesses work, they break people. And I mean everybody.
I was a boss for the longest time. I went up the ladder and was very proud of myself and all that stuff. But in the end I was a worse person while I was being a boss, blindly being the boss, than now that I’m more conscious of what’s going on.
What I mean is, you learn to give orders and you expect orders to be followed, and 67 percent of the time they’re not followed. People hear what they hear and they do what they do, and you go “Yeah, that’s what I meant,” right? You take credit for them. And when it’s something that you don’t want to take credit for, then you fire the person or you demote them or you put them in the corner somewhere and make them miserable.
You take all that stuff home. That’s just to say, you know, people that say “Oh, it stays at work”—no it doesn’t. You take all that stuff home and you apply it to your family. You can’t fire your family, so you do all kinds of impossible things to your kids.
I was talking to somebody yesterday, she’s pregnant, she’s worried about warping the kid’s mind and we talked about this. And that’s what I mean by broken people. And so it’s 65, when you hit 65, you welcome retirement because you’re so tired of the whole thing. And people that have been bosses now have money and resources to do other things, and they do charity, they go to Africa, they buy three elephants. And it’s the same thing, it’s the same thing over and over.
Lisa: It’s one of those things that when someone says it out loud, it’s like The Emperor’s New Clothes almost. It’s like you realize, “Yeah, that’s so true.” Isn’t that crazy that we all kind of enter into that game?
Matt: Happily. We do it happily.
Lisa: I like what you say also in the book about feudalism and that in many ways we haven’t really left that system—that it’s still the kind of landlords in charge. And I also like a term that, when I first came across you a few years ago, that you used that I hadn’t heard used before: this idea of a “fiat hierarchy.” Can you say something about what that means for listeners?
Matt: The problem is that I say too much, but stop me when you feel it’s appropriate. So the world is based on—and this is not my idea, I picked this up from some author a long time ago—our world of work is based on domination, right? Either I dominate you or you dominate me. And there’s a certain amount of hierarchy and domination that we have to have. We don’t know how to operate without hierarchies.
But like right now I’m talking, you’re listening, and then you’re talking and I shut up, like that. And the audience is listening and then they’ll take comments—they’re part of the conversation. But it’s never domination as opposed to a fixed hierarchy. I’ve got the capital, I bought this place, you’re going to be boss, you’re going to be a sub-boss, all the way down to the peons. Even if the peons are very well-educated people, highly skilled.
I worked in a world of programming and developers, really smart people, but they still get a salary at the end of the month and that’s it. And if I don’t like what they did, or if there’s something that goes against me or makes me lose face, then I fired them. And in our system, particularly in the US, when I fire that person, I’ve taken away not only salary but their health insurance, their status. I’ve stripped them.
I went through unemployment, and it really shook the hell out of me. I was frozen for three or four months. I didn’t know what to do because all those things had been taken away from me. You go to a party and someone asks “What do you do?” But now, I had nothing. To say “I was VP” kind of put you in a corner.
That’s the word of the fiat hierarchy. I’ve called it “fiat” because it’s “by I say so.” You know, why are you the boss? Because the owner told me to be the boss, and I told those people to be the boss under me, forever. No matter what. And other people say, “Oh, but he doesn’t do anything, he’s ignorant, he’s always slowing us down.” And that’s the thing—it is business hostile. That setup is business hostile. And again, I’m not the first one to say it. Business can be a lot better, a lot more engaging, a lot more financially sustainable, but we have to let go of the fiat hierarchy.
And the thing is, now I look at the world and I see it all over the place. Anywhere you go, there’s a fiat hierarchy. It’s more or less benign, more or less hostile to the communities, but it’s almost always there.
Lisa: I want to talk about two concepts in the book: co-management, which I guess oftentimes on this podcast I’m talking to guests about self-management, but I think they’re sort of the same thing under a different name; and co-ownership. I want to definitely spend some time talking about co-ownership, but let’s maybe start with co-management because I think chronologically that was your first exploration, right?
You said that you had this career as a boss for a while, and then at a certain point you decided to start this company Nearsoft, and you wanted to start that with a different model in mind, a different kind of vision, moving away from this kind of fiat hierarchy idea. So can you share something about that journey and some of the key milestones of exploring co-management at Nearsoft?
Matt: So yeah, Nearsoft was the big change for me. Before that, I was definitely in the fiat world, very happy in the fiat world, doing well and all that stuff. But there was something—I couldn’t be friends with people. They were my employees, and stuff like that. Even my partner, in theory I should have handled them at arm’s length, as a partner. And I got more satisfaction from being friends with people and just jamming with people.
So with Nearsoft, which we never thought was going to get as big as it did, I thought it would be nice to just be friends, not have titles, not have a fiat hierarchy. But we didn’t know anything, we were totally ignorant about it. And my partner said, “I’d like to build a company that works not just for us but for everybody.” I went, “Perfect.”
We didn’t know that was a reality, and then we came across Semler’s book, “Maverick,” which was an eye-opener. Because these guys did it in a factory setting, it should be a walk in the park for us in a software setting, right? You don’t carry buckets of cement or anything, and your hands are always clean. And I had this bias of “Oh, people are educated” and all that nonsense, which has gone away since.
So we took it as a guide, not as a Bible that you have to follow, but as a guide. And there were some things that we adopted, some things that we didn’t. And it kept fitting on itself—things were going better. Our business kind of went crazy on the basis that people could make decisions on the spot, without even asking us.
Like I said, we didn’t know where we were going, and for a long time people tried to ask us what to do. They asked for permission because we’re the owners. And eventually we started asking, “Are you asking me for an opinion, or are you asking for permission?” But it took a while for us to even realize that was a question. And they’d say, “I’m asking you for permission—never mind,” and go the other way.
But we had to kind of discover all these things—the fact that we didn’t have to pay for an elite class of managers. Everybody was managing everything. The fact that our clients started saying, “Oh, we’re going to grow the team. We want 10 more people like Joe over there.” It’s like, “Holy—can I say that?” So Joe made the sale. I’m just taking the order. Joe made the sale. So more power to them.
And that’s how it was. I didn’t have to make a lot of decisions, and my partner didn’t have to make a lot of decisions that we didn’t like to make. I don’t like to make decisions about where to eat. “What do you want to eat?” Really, what I want is split pea soup or fish. We don’t eat much. Why should I decide, mahi-mahi or something? I like both.
And the same thing with “Should we put books over there or over here? Should I sit over here or over there?” What are you asking me? I’m taking out a responsibility that I don’t need to take. You’re in the door like I am—sit wherever you want to. I honestly don’t care.
So it carries a lot of benefits to the business part, and we just kept going, kept going. And that’s where we ran into the ownership issue—that the owner is the ultimate boss. So all this talk about future work and not having bosses and flat organizations, which don’t exist (there’s nothing flat)—all of that is at best temporary. It lasts for a while.
When I’m alive, I can be benign with everybody, and then I die and my son is not super benign—actually my son is closer, so he would be even prettier. But what if we managed to make an arrangement where the fiat hierarchy wouldn’t invade us, where we’d continue to operate the way we’ve always operated? But what happens when we go? What if I get in a car accident? I’m 70 years old, so I could die any moment. I could die in this podcast—help!
But all those things could happen. For example, the companies that Laloux talked about—12 companies, and two or three of them have come back. FAVI in particular was inherited by the son, who was a lawyer, and the son said, “This is not working for me,” and he went the other way.
That all happens because he’s the owner, the legal owner of the operation. And unfortunately, we didn’t come to our idea until a couple of years after we sold the company. But I realized that self-management, co-management—co-management rhymes with co-ownership, that’s why I use it—and it emphasizes the cooperative, the collaborative part of it. There’s no “self”—there’s no company that manages itself. That’s why I changed it.
But the co-management thing is important because it gets people to think like adults and not ask for permissions. And then they bring that home also. The kid says, “Can I go out?” And you say, “Well, should you go out? It’s raining.” “I’d like to get wet.” “Okay, if you’d like to get wet, then go out. It’s not going to rain inside the house. But be careful that you don’t catch pneumonia, because it’s going around. So if you feel not quite right, come into the house and we’ll dry you out.”
But you train the kid to be an adult. And it makes some concessions as fiat parents—I can tell you because I raised my kids as fiat parents. “My way—you’ve got to learn this way, which is my way, because that’s what’s going to make you successful. And only financial success will make you happy.” My wife said once, “I just want my kids to be happy.” And I said, “Yeah, but it’s important that they’re going to be happy if they’re important,” because that was in my head. Because I believe that there’s only one way—I’m saying we do it to ourselves. And that’s not true. There’s plenty of people that don’t have resources in the world and are very happy, but I just couldn’t see it that way.
So people start taking that home, and for that reason it’s very important. But I think the only sustainable thing to do is to say, “Okay, now you’ve learned to manage yourself and us and everything else. You also need to learn the ownership part of it, because it has to be sustainable—it’s not a charity.”
Do we change strategies? Do we change quality? Do we change—you know, all those questions. Do we buy this or sell that? Do we borrow money? Do we not? All those things were left to the owners. And so that’s part of the training that they didn’t get. And when they go through to the next thing, since they don’t know that part, they’ll agitate for co-management, but they forget the ownership side. The brand, the quality, the market—all that is part of the ownership side of things.
So sharing the earnings, that’s nice, and we did that. K2K teaches that, and a lot of companies do, but you’ve got to go beyond that. And it’s going to be tough as hell to make it happen.
Lisa: I think this is like a real learning opportunity for this “future of work,” “new ways of working” movement—that, as you put it in the book, co-management is too dependent on enlightened monarchs. What happens when they walk off the stage?
This is a question that I think I was trying to ask Joost Minnaar when I interviewed him recently: What happens when you, or Buurtzorg, or whoever—you know, will this way of working be in any danger of reverting back, like you said, as with some of those case studies in Laloux’s book?
For me, this is a really important question, so I really like that you’re offering this provocation for us to think about. I think a lot of times in the context of self-managing companies, or even traditional hierarchical companies, when people are saying things like, “We want employees with an ownership mindset,” it feels unfair if they’re not owners for real.
Matt: Yeah, I’ve heard that. “Why don’t they think like owners?” Because they’re not! “Why don’t I act like an adult?” Because you don’t treat me like one! So I ask for permission to go to the bathroom: “Can I go to the bathroom?” And then I go.
By the way, this starts at home, like I said. We take it from work and we teach it at home. And then school is even worse. For number one, number two—I don’t know how you do it in Europe, but here those things are set. And there’s an answer—there’s one answer. If you get it right, you get an A. If you get it wrong, you get a B minus or a C or an F. But you don’t get to try a new way.
And that’s fiat thinking. At work it’s “We’re going to do it this way or that way.” How about we do both? How about we spread it with three possibilities? You believe this way is going to work, I’d like to see if this other way is going to work. If it doesn’t get me all the results that I expect, we’ve learned something. Maybe we can then marry the two at the end. Whatever. So experimentation is very important too.
Experimentation does not work in a fiat hierarchy because I make a commitment to you—you’re my boss—and I say, “Oh, we’ll have that by Friday.” And what do you do? You turn around, you tell your boss, “By Thursday night, Friday morning, it’ll be done.” And he turns around to the other guy, and he says, “Yeah, somewhere between Wednesday and Friday, but mostly Wednesday, no problem, it’ll be done.”
It keeps changing, so it’s the game of telephone, broken telephone. But it works against me. So I come on Thursday and I say, “You know what, what we thought was this big is only this big, so we need to move it to Monday.” And what’s your reaction going to be? “No, no, no, no, no, we’ve got to deliver something!”
I’m afraid that’s where technical debt comes from. That’s where all these—I don’t want to call them lies, but they’re lies. All these fantasies come in for me to help you keep face. You keep face to your boss, and all the way up. And then the boss says, “Oh, everybody delivered on Friday what they promised.” And then you find out three months later that that product is not what it should have been because it’s been losing steam and features on the way there. So again, it’s another thing that works against quality, which we’d like to have, right?
Lisa: There’s a really great story that you share in the book about the working group that came up with a proposal for how to distribute profits amongst people in the company. And eventually what they came up with was that we split it evenly. And you and your co-owner didn’t necessarily agree with that, but you were like, “Okay, let’s try it, and if it doesn’t work, next year we’ll do something different.”
I think that’s such a good test. One of my previous guests, Vivek Menon from Danfoss, had a great challenge to any leaders who say, “Yeah, we have self-managing teams” or “We’re an empowering leader.” And he says, “Okay, tell me the last decision that got made that you disagreed with.” And then usually people fall silent.
So I thought that was a nice example of how a group proposed something you didn’t necessarily agree with, but you said, “Let’s try it, let’s experiment with it.” And then I also really liked the notion that when it was reviewed and revisited, there was a sense that, “Yeah, there’s probably a better way of doing it, but this way is simple and it’s easy to trust.” I thought that was super interesting.
Because I’ve worked with groups that have had these conversations about how to share and distribute profit and bonuses, and there’s always someone who suggests, “Let’s just do it equally,” and then there’s always people who disagree with that. It takes a lot of time and energy, and it’s really hard to come up with something that’s “fair” because it’s such a subjective term.
Matt: The other thing that’s hard about that is that we assume that there’s one way of doing it. So either we do it equally, or we do it according to years in the company, or to educational levels. But it’s the same for everybody. If you didn’t go to school, you get nothing, or you get the minimum because we agree that there should be a minimum.
But if you have a PhD—my question is, “Okay, PhD—but this guy didn’t go to traditional school. What did they contribute?” And I may have an opinion of it, you have an opinion of it, and the other person has an opinion of it. Most people don’t even care—they don’t know what he’s doing and stuff like that.
And that’s where the “red shrimp” system came in, where you render your opinion by the number of “reds” or coupons you give this person. And I render it differently because I don’t think he’s contributed much, or maybe his contribution was, “Man, I read that in a book 10 years ago.” And the other person could say, “We’ll give this person reds on the basis of the contribution.”
You may give more, I may give less, but that’s what we see. So what’s the ultimate fairness? Fairness resides in me, but it also resides in you, and it resides in the other person—not one way of doing it. And so that was the other significant thing in the book, the “red shrimp” system, which I didn’t realize that the Eurovision—I’m a big fan of the Eurovision—kind of works that way.
Lisa: Because in Eurovision, countries get points but they have to go to other countries.
Matt: Yes, that’s true! Someone pointed it out—I read a book recently and they pointed it out, and I went, “God, three years of Eurovision and I didn’t realize that.”
Lisa: But the thing is, there were also a lot of scandals around that. When I lived in Spain, the Spanish and the Greeks were giving each other all the points or something. I’m British, and we never get points in the UK because everyone hates us. So it always feels like there are strategic ways of making sure the UK never gets points.
Matt: Well, if most of the songs and singers are from the Mediterranean, it kind of makes sense. You can make a deal with the guy across the water, and you can go in a straight line. But how do you do that kind of distribution without scandalous things happening? You know, me giving you all my points and you giving me all your points? And that’s where transparency comes in.
If the system is transparent and everyone notices this ping-pong back and forth between two people, someone’s going to say, “Isn’t it funny what’s with you guys that you always do this?” But I don’t think it will get to that, because knowing that it’s going to be in public, people are going to be able to see it. It’s enough for people to roll back a little bit. But when there is, other people will catch it. I don’t have to catch it, you don’t have to catch it. Other people who know what’s going on will look at it.
And like I said, maybe it works, maybe it’s fair, maybe it’s not. If those people feel it’s fair and I’m not paying attention to it, that’s fine too. But that way, you own the company dynamically. You contribute more this month, you own a little bit more this month. You do less the next month, and that way, when the first dollar comes in (or Euro or whatever), it gets distributed according to the percentage that we have at the time. Next month it’ll be different, next month it’ll be different.
But that’s, I think, been the obstacle all along: How do you make this? If we own the company in common, how do we decide who gets how much? K2K took the one way out, which is one person, one vote. So everybody gets divided by N.
As much as I think divided by N was a good start to make people trust the system, people are not quite happy with the divide-by-N approach when it comes to money. Before giving out eggs or carrots or something like that, then it’d be okay to give everybody equal shares. But when it comes to money, people get funny about that.
And so the system at K2K is no longer that way, even at InCore, which is the new name for Nearsoft. Because enough people said, “Oh, this is not fair,” and they found a way they were happy with. I don’t know what it is, I don’t care. But they changed it because it was money-related.
And in this other way, money can go through it, whatever. Carrots can go through it, eggs, whatever you want. It can go through the same mechanism, saying “I own 50, you own 25,” that means you get twice as much as me. And if I have any questions as to why you got 50, I get to look and go, “Oh, oh, okay. All right, I see why you got 50. I think you’re doing a lot,” and “Damn, I didn’t realize that.” So that might be the way to make it work. I say it might be because, other than Eurovision and a few other places, I haven’t seen it work, or I haven’t seen it put in place.
Lisa: I think like whenever I’ve mentioned to people “co-ownership,” people go, “Oh, yeah, you mean like cooperatives.” But like you, I’ve interacted with a lot of cooperatives. People often talk about John Lewis Partnership in the UK, for example. And inside, it’s a pretty traditional—it feels very much like a fiat hierarchy. As you talk about in the book, it’s like symbolic ownership, but when it comes to big decisions, I don’t really have a say.
So it’s like cooperatives have been playing around with some aspects of co-ownership, and now this “future of work” movement, we’ve been playing around with some aspects of co-management. But there’s an opportunity to kind of bring the two together—what could be possible with co-management and co-ownership? That’s super inspiring. It seems like we don’t have many examples at the moment of that.
Matt: Yeah, the only example I can think of that comes really close is WL Gore, because as I understand it, the family still owns some percentage of the company, but the majority of the company is owned by the people. I don’t know how they distribute it and stuff like that, but that’s the closest.
People mention Mondragon, but to me that’s a very traditional, very hierarchical co-op. It’s not a good example. I thought John Lewis—I listened to a recording of John Lewis himself talking, one of those old recordings, and I was quite impressed. But unfortunately, he left the whole traditional hierarchy, the fiat hierarchy, behind.
Same thing with that company in Germany—I’m sorry, in Denmark. So Europe has a lot of these attempts of getting real close, but not quite. And Buurtzorg (I’ll say it in English, in American English) also may be very close, for all I know, but I don’t know what the ownership is like over there. But they come pretty close to the ideal of small groups that manage their own and reward each other and stuff like that. So we’ll see how it goes.
Lisa: And it’s interesting because WL Gore has been doing that since like the 40s or something, right? It’s a long time.
Matt: Well, Gore started in his basement in ‘52. I remember that because I was born in ‘51, and I go, “Oh, wow.” And then in ‘58 is when they made it a company. They came up with Cortex and all kinds of things—a physical company too. I mean, they make chemicals and wet things and stuff like that, which I find a little bit more impressive.
Lisa: Why do you think—why do you think it hasn’t happened? Like, why do you think there are so few examples of this? There have been attempts, but nothing has yet kind of concreted in terms of co-management and co-ownership.
Matt: Because the fiat hierarchical model has taken over. We’ve made it the dominant force in the world. And it’s been financially successful, it’s given us a lot of things. I mean, if you think of it—I am literally alive, I am literally alive because of medicine. And you’ve got to be thankful for it.
Don’t just say, “Well, let’s do without everything,” and do the Russian Revolution all over again. Now this would be more than being silly about it. There’s a lot of good that’s in it. I’m not about to change anything. I’m not even changing ownership—you still own, this is my book, I own it. It’s just that I own it with two other people, and we’re making it so that anybody can copy and take pieces of it because we see value in it for us.
All that part of it, I’m all for it. How that ownership is held and what kinds of things we’ve been through to get to even the ownership we have today is the tragic thing. At one point we owned people. The whole fantasy of all the poor indigenous people here in the Americas died because we had immune systems they didn’t and they died—no, no, we killed them. We worked them to death in the mines, in places that they wouldn’t have worked.
Slavery existed, and it exists in this part of the world. It was not new. But it’s gotten more and more extreme. The American industry in this area, up in California, they grabbed slaves on a temporary basis to do the harvesting for them, and then people would walk back home. And then they would go and catch them again. The idea of grabbing people to do work for you was there, and it makes sense because it’s a domestication kind of thing. We grab a thing that looks like a cow today and we domesticate it so it looks like a cow today. And a wolf becomes a dog. So it kind of makes sense.
And that part became very successful. You make a few people wealthy, and those few people were smart enough, for the most part, to create a hierarchy of wealth. It’s “trickle down”—in this country, trickle down is a big thing. The only thing that I know trickles down is piss, okay? Nothing else trickles down.
So there is a boss that has sub-bosses that have sub-bosses, because that’s your protection. You’re at the center, you’ve got the circles of bosses and people that get a little bit less, a little bit less. But every so often, two or three of them go, “Hey, why don’t we cut his head off?” And we see this throughout history. Europe is full of that history, and it’s fun to read. Or they get silly, like George (whatever his name, number was) with the Americas. He thought he could keep exploiting the Americas for nothing. It’s like, no, you met your match at this point with the Americans.
I have a lot of respect for the U.S. system. I’m from Cuba originally, and so I have a lot of respect for this country and the Constitution and everything else. I think for the time it was brilliant—brilliant building, brilliant. The thing is, they’ve never been static, and that’s the first thing they recognized. The Constitution is minimal, and the Declaration of Independence is nothing—it’s like two pages or ten. Because they expected things to continue changing.
I believe they changed in ways that they didn’t foresee—slaves being free and everybody being equal, with women and stuff like that. It’s like, “No, no, you don’t do that.” But that’s fine. They weren’t trying to rule the future. They were giving a foundation to the future. And I think in that sense, it was super brilliant, because we’re the beneficiaries of all that.
So what do we have to tweak so that people are not broken by broken systems? That’s the primary thing, and that’s what we try to do in the book. I’ve created some other papers since then about money and land and governments, because they kind of touch on it, but I don’t get into it really in the book.
But the company is the beachhead. It’s where people spend most of their working hours, right? So that’s where they learn things, they learn their values, they learn this is more important than that, and so on. That’s going to spill out into the rest of society. Then they can start questioning, “Why is this guy, the mayor in town, telling me how to run my store?”
American libertarians like to say that they think that way, but they don’t. But why should he rule my store? And it’s even more convincing when the question is, “Why should he rule our store?” We have to consider the rest of society, of course. We can’t dump crap in the middle of the street and all that stuff. But we have to work with others, experiment, and do things.
And as it starts to spill out, it affects how we handle land and how we handle governments. National governments, I think, are a big obstacle to solving the problems that we’re having with the world today. I put it right in the lap of national governments—not the oil companies and all that stuff. They’re beneficiaries of national governments, but national governments are standing in the middle of it.
So they try to fix it—it’s all these international agreements and blah, blah, blah. It’s all nonsense because Trump comes along and just undoes everything. The guy that follows Macron in France will come along and undo everything. In the UK, what’s his name, with the hair—he’s undoing as much as he can.
So we elect our rulers—that’s better than passing it from father to son and daughter. But what I would like to see is, no, we don’t have rulers. I’m a ruler, but I have to live with these people in this community. If I don’t like it anymore, I accept that community or look for another one. But that’s the kind of rule. And we have to look out for the world because without this spaceship Earth, we’re dead.
I think that’s more likely to be a concern for individuals than for somebody whose only purpose in life is to make money. Because that guy is making more money, like Bezos is number one now—“I’ll try to get there,” says Gates, whatever. It’s ridiculous. And by the way, I don’t think that they’re really competing on that basis. I don’t really think they are, but this is what it looks like.
And in the process, they can’t take a step backwards and say, “Okay, we’ve got to do some different things in order to save our spaceship.” And I don’t see them doing that because, again, they’re responsible to the shareholders and stuff like that, to the system in general. So we have to help them to do the right thing.
Lisa: And it sort of loops back to one of the first things that you started talking about, which was that you were for a while a boss and benefiting from being a boss in that system. But at some point—you used the word “conscious”—you had a realization or something kind of dawned on you like, “Hey, I’m not okay with this,” or “I want to set up a company that works for everyone and not just for me and the owners.”
Roberto Martinez was also a very enlightened monarch, so I’m thinking—and I’m not a believer in either/or. I really like the idea of “Let’s not just rely on or be dependent on enlightened monarchs, let’s create ownership models and organizational models that avoid that.”
And at the same time, I’m also interested in what does it take for someone to become enlightened, if we want to use that word? Because it strikes me that that’s an uncomfortable, maybe even painful process to realize the harm you have done, in some ways, to learn another way of being when you’ve been conditioned into the fiat hierarchy way of being. What have been steps for you along that journey of becoming conscious, in terms of who you are?
Matt: So the first step was more of a feeling that things weren’t working for me as a boss. And I knew they weren’t working necessarily for the people around me. So based on that, I had this feeling of “Let’s do something different.”
Adrian Perez, one of the co-authors of this book, discovered “Maverick.” He insisted that I read it, and then I insisted that Roberto read it, and we all read it, and we went, “Oh, we can do this.”
And then later, much later, is when I started thinking about, “Oh, what have I done?” First, there’s a joyful thing of “Oh, we can do this without permissions.” Which doesn’t save us from consultation—consultation is important, particularly if it’s a “below the waterline” kind of decision. But you’re not asking for permission, you’re asking “What do you think? What are the pros and cons?”
But then I started thinking, “Well, how did I raise my kids?” And I went through a couple of years—more than that, probably—of really beating myself up. “I should have done this, I should have done that.” And that came to a point where, “Well, I should have, could have, would have, but I can’t. It’s gone. So what can I do now, in the future, to make up for what I created?”
And really, the answer came down to—you have to ask. The first fiat thing is thinking that you have to answer. And so after all those things, I think the answer was, “What can I do? Anything unique for me?” And most of the time, the answer was “Nope.” “What’s up?” “I’m happy with who I am.”
Okay, so now I’m free from feeling guilty and all that stuff because they’re happy with who they are. Again, my oldest son contributed to this book quite a bit. So amongst all the negative things, some positive things happened as well.
And it’s not just us. A lot of people who started cooperatives—John Lewis is very clear in his story that he wanted to do something other than what his dad did. His dad was a real “captain of industry”—that’s a nice term. But I want to do something different than what his dad did, and so he came up with certain things.
I’m not criticizing him because he was a child of his time. What we have to say is, “Okay, you did that, great. That’s not enough. Let’s do the next step and the next step.” Future work, co-management, semi-whatever you want to call it—there’s another step. And I think this is co-ownership. Beyond that, I don’t know what it is, and I don’t dare predict. If I figure it out before I knock over, I’ll write another book or something like that. But right now, I just think this is going to be hard enough to get out into the world, and you’re being a big part of promoting it and getting it in people’s heads.
That there’s something beyond just feeling happy and just feeling good. That’s all fine, but what do you think for the long term? If you want to decide to stop working—that’s what we call retirement now, which I don’t—I think that’s one of the first things that will disappear. I’m 70, I’m not about to retire. I’m enjoying the heck out of what I’m doing. Why would I retire from life? It doesn’t make sense.
But what if I want to stop working for a living? If I want to stop contributing to the company? Well, I probably start another company on my own just by doing what I’m doing. Other people come along, and eventually income will come my way. But what if it doesn’t? Well, I have my brands that I got from this company and that company and the other company, and it’s going down in time. It’s been less and less and less, but it’s providing an income for me.
So I think it’s overall a workable system. And the biggest obstacle we’ve got is right here, because we have brought this system to bear, and now we have to undo it. And unlearning is really hard—unlearning anything, undoing what you’ve created is really, really hard. It’s scary stuff.
Lisa: So maybe one of the ways to kind of start to conclude our conversation is, what would your advice be, or what have you learned about unlearning that you could offer listeners who are on various different stages of their journey of exploring new ways of working, co-management, co-ownership, who knows? What words of wisdom would you throw their way?
Matt: I don’t—I don’t have anything to be honest.
Lisa: I thought you might say that!
Matt: Well, all I can do is talk about how I’ve been going about it. Obviously, I’ve been pretty verbose about this, but I don’t know if it’s the first thing, but the most important thing to me has been acknowledging and respecting each person for what they are.
So I have lots of friends and family who are gay, one is transitioning, and this and that. I was very cool—I accept them, I’m a very modern kind of man. But you know, I knew who was gay, who was transitioning. In my mind, they were in their boxes. “Oh, he’s gay—just don’t say any gay jokes in front of him.” But I would say gay jokes in front of my other friends who I knew were very macho and stuff like that. And women, by the way—discrimination crosses genders.
And then I started looking at them as, damn, they’re people. I don’t know how it happened. Maybe it was thinking about this ownership. We all have the same capabilities. That expression, “There but for the grace of God go I”—it’s so true. Anything you see in another human being, the craziest stuff that Trump ever did and what’s-his-name with the hair is doing in the UK—I can look at it and go, “That goes me, that could be me, given the right circumstances.” If I had hair like what’s-his-name, I probably would have done the same thing, okay?
It’s so circumstantial. So we’re really lucky. I consider—I almost every day, I say at least once, “I’m really lucky,” because I am. The circumstances aligned themselves so that they ended up in me, which I’m pretty happy with. I bet the same is true for everybody, except this guy who was having depression. But not because he wasn’t happy with himself, but because of the depression. That’s fine.
And I found that other people were not happy with themselves—no depression, no clinical conditions. They were just not happy with what they’re doing. “But I have to do it because I make a pretty good living doing this. I have to—what else would I do?” And that’s the first obstacle. “What would I do? I can’t afford to live without an income, and I have two cars and three kids, and I need this much money to have that life.”
So to me, it came to, “Okay, so everybody has had a lucky path, even though they went through unlucky times.” I had my lucky times, but it doesn’t matter—it ended up being what it is today. I’m grateful, and this seems true for everybody.
So I no longer have gay friends or transitioning friends—I have friends. And people that I don’t like, they may even live across the street from me. But the thing is, they’re people. They’re not resources, they’re not geniuses, they’re just people.
And then I found myself not caring—I mean caring, not caring, but not carrying as an obstacle, for a bunch of other things. If they’re poor, not poor—or a guy coming to me begging in the street, which you normally throw some money at and say, “Go away, go away, be happy with the two dollars I sent your way.” And now I stop and talk to the guy. Most of them have mental problems, and that’s—we need to fix that.
But you start to see people as people. And by the way, from that, I came to the idea of the reds distribution thing—that anybody could distribute it. It doesn’t have to be—I don’t have anything special other than that information that is not disclosed. And so anybody can learn how to distribute money and stuff like that.
The book has gone through at least three lifetimes. It started being about Nearsoft and happy, happy, and then it became more a mix of things. I think I’ll show you an early copy—I’m grateful that you didn’t see it. Most people went, “What the heck is this?” And then it finally became this book, because it’s gone through all these transformations that came out in my head.
So try to look at people as people, and it’s really hard. It is really hard.
Lisa: It’s so true. We have so many biases, and I think often money is a way of revealing them. When you say, “Why can’t anyone decide how we distribute money?” that’s usually when you get protests. And if you really dig under the surface, there’s some assumption that, “Well, maybe they’ll make a stupid decision,” or “Only educated people should be able to do that,” or “People with the special information,” you know?
I just really want to acknowledge you for writing this book and for bringing this into the movement. I think it’s a real contribution. I think it’s bringing up really important questions for us to be asking, and I’m really glad that you’re doing it. So thank you, and thank you for coming on the podcast and sharing all of your experiences and learnings. It’s really, really valuable.
Matt: It’s an honor. I really like the way you do things and talking to you. It really is. Thank you.
