Over the past few months we’ve had lots of fun sharing the K&S story through the MIX competition partnered by the Human Capital Institute. As we know, we got through to the semi-finals – here is what happened next!
Success! (Without quite ‘winning’)
OK, we didn’t ‘win’. But what a pleasure and inspiration to connect and learn with the ‘competition’. Lisa Haneberg’s winning entry provides an alternative model for Talent Management, and other finalists - IDEO and Atlassian – provide very interesting stories around collaboration and performance management. You can see more about their entries here. As for our entry, well the journey has been a success in a number of ways…
Joining other leading lights in management innovation
The Mix Fix journey gave us the opportunity to make great connections. To start off with, I got the opportunity to meet Gary Hamel, who is a real hero in the quest to develop organisations fit for human people. I also connected with Polly LaBarre – former editor of Fast Company magazine and co-author of the brilliant book Mavericks At Work. And I met with the wider Mix and HCI team as well as other MIX community members – with whom I planted seeds for learning and working together in future.
A dialogue around human revolutions
Through the Mix experience I saw such great energy and drive to developing new approaches to how we build organisations - starting with people and passion fist. This is wonderful for me - not only linked to how K&S works as a company, but also in seeing how important our work is further afield. What we are talking about is a management revolution based on the premise that today’s management models are out of date. It’s a dialogue that has involved people from Gary Hamel to Peter Senge to Daniel Pink. The K&S story and our work is part of this collective consciousness - we are truly shaping the future of how we work!
There is much more to say about the conversations and presentations from the conference. Maybe the single quote that stands out for me was from Gary Hamel in his keynote presentation, explaining how ‘remarkable contributions’ come from ‘transcendent values such as joy, truth, honour, beauty, justice and love. What this says to me is – ‘we’re people after all, and we like human things’. When you look at the success of companies Hamel refers to - from Apple to Google to WL Gore - they are building from this perspective up.
Building on for the future
I don’t want this to simply fizzle away into something that was ‘nice to do’. Gladly, we have already been invited by the MIX community to join a ‘Hackathon’ – a collaborative online project to more deeply explore the ‘hardcode of management 2.0’. Hard coding doesn’t sound too K&S I know, but I am sure we can share and learn with equal value in a special way.
More than the Hackathon, I think there will be other opportunities to learn and hopefully work with the wider MIX community and linked networks. I am also curious to explore connections with proposed work such as the ‘Playful Perspectives’ initiative we are working on with K&S UK partners. So it’s been a great journey – and I think more to come. Here is to contributing to a management revolution!
Not least, the MIX entry provided us with a great opportunity to come together as colleagues and reflect on how we do things. It’s been a pleasure to do this – thank you Marloes, Saskia, Philippe, Cees, Paul K and Ans!