Self-Managing Organizations: Teal is the new Orange

Liip today is green. With that we are not only referring to its logo or the fact that we try to travel by train and compensate our energy consumption, we are also considered “green” based on the definition of Frederic Laloux author of Reinventing Organizations. This means we have moved on from an “orange” organization entirely focused on innovation to one focused on empowerment and values-driven culture. In this talk we will discuss a bit our transformation, our learnings as we have grown from a fusion of two small companies totaling less than 20 to over 100 co-workers over an eight year period. Along the way we had to answer many questions, like how to deal with offices with 20+ people, how to retain our culture as we add new offices, how to adapt management, how not to add middle management and why this even matters, how to deal with people leaving, how to collaborate with the open source world. We will also discuss the very early state of discussion moving towards becoming a “teal” organization, which would require evolving towards full self-management.

About Liip: Has won several prizes for both technical achievements as well as its committment to sustainability (kununu.com, prix egalité, ZKB sustainability award). It has managed its growth entirely organically without any outside investments. All surplus earnings are reinvested into the company or paid out as additional salaries. At the same time Liip has been a heavy contributor to many open source projects, including PHP core, Symfony2 and Drupal.