Morning Star: Replicating Culture is Hard to Do 

If Self-Management Is Such a Great Idea, Why Aren’t More Companies Doing It?, asked Forbes last week. The article cites Morning Star Co., the well-known self-managed tomato processor that many other companies have wanted to imitate. The authors speculate that executives are too habituated to the perks of power to make the shift. In this short commentary, Brian Robertson offers a more systemic explanation. 

“There are companies like Morning Star out there applying self-management techniques, or building their organizational technology with self-management baked in. But there aren’t many of them. There are only a handful, aside from the ones that we work with practicing Holacracy. I think part of the reason is it is very, very difficult to clone that kind of model because it’s reinforced through a cultural set of norms. There’s no written down constitution, or rules of the game, for doing it their way. In fact, it’s really a leader at the top, ultimately, legally saying, “We’re going to do it this way”, and then it’s baked into the culture, which sustains it just fine. It’s effective for them, but how do you clone a culture? That’s very, very difficult, and if you were going to try, the first thing you would have to do is write down the rules that define the culture, which are all implicit and held in the cultural landscape.

What I think makes Holacracy so much more spreadable and scalable is that it is baked into a set of rules; it’s not just a culturally-enforced set of norms — it’s actually a Constitution. There’s a constitution that spells out the rules of the game, and those rules have a self-organization baked in — one that, in fact, not even the legal boss at the top can trump if we’ve actually gone to the level of legally adopting this constitution, which is a step some organizations may choose to take once they’ve vetted it and proven it’s the right technology for them.

So I think if we want to see models like Morning Star’s actually spread in the world, what we need is to really boil them down to the essence of how things need to work, and bake that into a game, a set of rules, concretely. And that’s exactly what Holacracy has done.

I think another key point, too, for a model like Morning Star’s to spread in the world, it needs to be very lightweight. It’s one thing for Morning Star to have its own kind of cultural norm-set that people in that culture have learned and have embodied, but if we want other organizations to be able to replicate it and adopt it, it needs to be adoptable. And you can’t take a really fine heavyweight system — if you look at Morning Star’s model, there’s a lot of moving parts to getting that working. So simplicity is critical if we’re going to roll this out in other organizations and scale it. I think that’s one of the strengths of Holacracy — we have a simple system that allows complex emergent self-organizing behavior.”