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Meet the leaders of pioneering organizations who are shaping the future of work. Hear their stories and feel inspired to take action and ignite change in your workplace.
Day One - 30th October 2019 - Morning |
MERCEDES-BENZ.IOStuttgart, Germany |
MINDERA
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VOXEL GROUP
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GOOD REBELS
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We ignite and protect Mercedes-Benz' digital future!
At Mercedes-Benz.io it’s our mission to create digital experiences to pave the way for Mercedes-Benz future and a new world of mobility. We are the membrane between the worlds of input and output. This means that we build upon qualitative & quantitative customer insights gained through customer surveys, testing and tracking user data as well as the expert knowledge of our employees. We translate these insights into digital experiences and generate an output for the digital future of Mercedes-Benz and its customers. We shape new work and work as we live: collaborative, reflective, creative and agile. Not just for our own sake, but for the sake of being a real team with Mercedes-Benz. Thinking like a start-up while delivering like a grown-up We don’t care about your shoes, as long as you’re wearing the right attitude. At Mercedes-Benz.io we walk the talk and make things happen. We do not digitize for being digital but for a better tomorrow for our customers. That’s not our job; it’s our passion. Therefore, we love to reflect and challenge everything – the status quo, Mercedes-Benz and ourselves. But don’t worry, for us the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We share the same beliefs and stand up for each other. This is why we hire unique …not hierarchy levels. Interested to be engaged in a continuously evolving company to work hard, play hard and party hard? Then screw it, let’s do it and take place in the driver's seat to revolutionize as a fierce tribe called Mercedes-Benz.io the way for a digital new world of mobility. |
Simon Truckenmüller (54 years old, 3 children, designer, musician, petrolhead and an evangelist for new work), is working as a UX designer, digital brand design expert and holacracy ambassador for Mercedes-Benz.io, located in Stuttgart and Berlin (Germany) and Lisbon (Portugal).
After his design master in 1997, Simon started to work as a UX designer for various companies with the focus on e-commerce. E.g. Sunrise communications, Sidestep, Runnerspoint, Neckermann, Kodak, Galeria Kaufhof, Primondo. dm, PitStop, Mercedes-Benz and more. During these times he also made many experiences as a team leader or a so called head off. But Simon always struggled with classical hierarchies and the waste of skills and power of people in that environment. So the call to join a startup that works for the Daimler AG and wants to setup a responsive organizational framework was a big chance for him. Simon started working for Mercedes-Benz.io in the beginning of 2015. Besides his roles in UX, Simon is strongly engaged and part of the organizational development of the company from scratch. The focus was always on creating a responsive organisation, that enables people to work agile, self organized and self responsive. It started small with 15 employees and grew up to more than 330 employees today within 4.5 years. They learned and changed a lot. They went ahead, stepped back and looked for other ways to come back on track. But they still believe in holacracy as a responsive framework for an organization that is needed to stand future requirements in terms of people, culture, speed, agility and globalization. Especially in the environment of a blue chip as the Daimler AG is one, because it triggers those big players for change. Simon loves to share and exchange his experiences with other people because he is convinced that these new working models will be the future basement of our work life. |
Mindera was founded in 2014 to build and create Software Engineering Applications for clients across the globe.
We work with a bunch of great people, in a culture that reflects self-organization, commitment and responsibility. We encourage our colleagues to take risks, make decisions, work in a collaborative way and talk to everyone. We do not have a power hierarchy and decisions are distributed and depend on context and knowledge. We have self proposed salaries and also a group of people that decided to share their salaries with each other in a transparent way. We keep evolving and working in our culture to reflect what we do and who we are. Our common purpose is: At Mindera we use technology to build products we are proud of, with people we love. While we navigate through what self-organization means to the people at Mindera, we hold these 3 principles close to our heart: 1. WE ARE HUMANS We act like humans, we talk like humans, and we think like humans. And we call out anyone who does the opposite. 2. WE WORK TOGETHER We insist on working collaboratively. No rockstars. No departments. The whole team owns the whole project, together. 3. WE CHANGE Nothing is sacred. From our habits, to our rituals, to our environment. Change is a natural part of human life, and we prefer to embrace it. Learn more about our culture in our Handbook: http://bit.ly/MinderaHanbook And check out our Blog: http://mindera.com/ We have offices Porto, Aveiro & Coimbra: Portugal | Leicester: UK | San Diego: USA | Bangalore & Chennai: India |
Sofia Reis is the co-founder and director at Mindera (with offices in Portugal, UK, USA and India), as well as co-founder and Ecosystems Explorer at Lemon Works. Sofia loves coming up with new ideas and solutions that bring people together.
After doing a degree in Architecture and gaining experience in project management, she has started doing Project Management for Mobile projects and quickly moved into supporting the Operational management of a startup that grew from 5 people to 220 in 4 years. There she fell in love with human behaviour and connections, and the complex interactions in the workplace. Sofia is engaged in two projects that are deeply important to her: Mindera — a tech company running on self-organisation with a distributed decision structure — and LemonWorks — a startup engaged in making work meaningful for everyone, through personal development, organisational culture shifts, and office space design as an important element on how people feel and interact at work. Lemon Works has also been a relevant part of supporting the evolution of Mindera’s culture. |
Luis Simões is the co-founder and People Engineer at LemonWorks. He is a lego enthusiast that engages in Collaborative Learning and loves to investigate Human Brain Interactions.
He started studying computer engineering and quickly discovered it was not the world he wanted to be in. Luis realised he wanted to make a difference in people’s lives, so he started by building and delivering training sessions to enable young people to develop their soft skills. A few years later he got interested in how organisations structure themselves and operate on a daily basis, and how that influences how people feel and behave. Working in a big company gave him the experience he was looking for, and also the will to explore new ways of organising people around work. LemonWorks was created to deliver a different way to relate us to work. One that is adapted to people, flexible and that can provide an environment where people can be themselves and exercise autonomy, mastery and purpose. |
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In 2019, Voxel Group was ranked the fourth best place to work in Spain and the first in Barcelona. At the core of this achievement lies our culture and a massive transformative purpose: Fostering happiness through the creation of happy, healthy and high performance organizations. In recent years the company has gone through a holistic and humanistic Digital Transformation Process.
Voxel is the world’s leading electronic billing service provider in the Travel sector, an industry which accounts for almost one third of the total services exports and more than 10% of all jobs worldwide. Thousands of hotels and travel companies in over 100 countries currently use Voxel’s baVel Platform to streamline their invoicing and payments’ procedures. With consistent 2-digit growth rates in the last 15 years, Voxel is today one of the most thriving companies in Spain and one of the most respected and innovative technology partners in the industry. |
In few words: tremendously optimistic, enthusiastic and collaborative. At Voxel Group the culture is being Challenge Maniacs, Change Lovers, People Freaks and Fun-Tastic team players. Àngel Garrido is currently the CEO of Voxel, but more than this, he is sponsoring the transformation process of the company and he is directly involved in it. In Voxel they are continuously learning about new frameworks and methodologies, gaining lots of experiences day after day that Àngel will be pleased to share. Àngel participates in strategic decisions in a collaborative manner that are leading our group to become a conscious, happy and healthy organization in a high-performance environment.
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Santiago Martínez is Voxel Group’s Head of Transformation since 2016. In this period, he has orchestrated the transformation projects in the company introducing Agile and Sociocracy principles within a Lean Change Management framework. Santiago has more than 15 years of experience managing IT, Innovation and transformation processes in both Spain and Latin America. He obtained his primary degree in Engineering and he has earnt Master’s degrees - in Business Administration, Project Management and Agile Methodologies.
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Good Rebels was founded in 1997 under a different brand as a digital agency and design boutique. Since then, they worked hard to establish a strong culture, based on “autonomy and responsibility”. Different reads on management and previous experiences influenced the road towards self-management in 2010. These 3 points can help understand why Good Rebels culture is unique amongst professional service firms.
1) Self-directed autonomous teams working directly with clients On a monthly basis, the company P&L as well as financial results of each project are shared within the whole organisation. Training (hard and soft skills) is encouraged to empower less experienced workers to challenge senior thinking. Hiring is decentralised and firing is mostly a result of a team evaluation process. 2) Radical Transparency The results of Good Rebels peer reviews are public, so that it becomes a real feedback tool. Salaries are open and salary raises are crowd sourced, meaning that everybody in the organisation has a say and a formula helps establish the raises based on performance and peer evaluation. A strong open conversational culture, allows everybody to speak their minds, regardless of seniority. 3) Love & Partnership Good Rebels latin roots influenced some peculiar traits like what they call Rebel love. Their "people first" approach introduces a caring philosophy for co-workers that goes well beyond normal “emotional bonds”. They evolved from a family owned company to a cooperative model, similar to a professional partnership, but with some twists (i.e. partners salaries are capped at 4 times new hire salaries). Good Rebels co-founders, Juan Luis and Fernando Polo published a book about their culture and leadership style based on self-management principles called “Leadertarians: creating intrapreneurs in the digital age”. You can download book here ( http://fernandopolo.com/books/ ) or read the manifesto here (https://www.slideshare.net/goodrebels/manifiesto-lidertarios-49225562) |
Fernando Polo is vision holder and global coordinator at Good Rebels (www.goodrebels.com), a digital strategy and creative company working with clients like Toyota, Santander, IKEA, LG Electronics, Abbott Laboratories or Lexus at the intersection of people, brands and technology. After substantial growth in recent years, the company now employs over 100 people and has offices in the UK, Spain and Latam.
He is Associate Professor at IE Business School and an international speaker at seminars and conferences, where he talks about customer centricity and the impact of digital transformation on companies, culture and leadership. He is the author of the best-selling book "#Socialholic: All you need to know about social media marketing”, and “#Leadertarians: creating intrapreneurs in the digital age”. Fernando has a degree in Industrial Engineering from ICAI (Madrid) and a Master's in Commercial Management and Marketing from Fondation EPF (Paris). He worked at IBM BCS (formerly PwC Consulting) and has started up two digital companies and worked as marketing and operations director at several others. |
