By Rod Collins
Morning Star is not your usual company. That’s because the 400-person California-based agribusiness has no supervisors. Rather than relying on the intelligence of an elite few, Morning Star is a highly successful self-managing peer-to-peer network that has skillfully leveraged the “power of many” to sustain its position as the world’s largest tomato processor.
From the beginning, the company’s founder, Chris Rufer, built his innovative enterprise on two core principles. First, individuals should keep their commitments to others. People at Morning Star are not handed assignments. Instead they negotiate Colleague Letters of Understanding with their co-workers, and, to assure everyone is honoring their commitments, the metrics associated with these agreements are published bi-weekly.
The second principle is that no individual should use force against others or their property. This means that no single person has the authority to issue an order or the ability to unilaterally fire another person. For the people at Morning Star, what they do and with whom they work are always collective decisions.
For over three decades, these two principles have served as a solid foundation to support an innovative management technology that is disrupting the way we build and lead human organizations.
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About the Author: Rod Collins (@collinsrod) is the Innovation Sherpa at Salt Flats and the author of Wiki Management: A Revolutionary New Model for a Rapidly Changing and Collaborative World (AMACOM Books).