Articles - Essays

Francesco Mondora is co-CEO with his brother Michele of Mondora.com. Francesco and Michele have always innovated in the field of Information Technology and have always shared the company as a point of innovation.

Abstract

Mondora.com SrL SB is a software and consulting company specializing in the design and development of innovative software solutions, technological governance and technical training for large organizations of various types. Since 2002 Mondora, which has its registered office in Milan and operational headquarters in Morbegno in Valtellina, supports its customers with value solutions that use emerging technological paradigms, such as cloud computing, Agile Methods, and finally DevOps. Over the years Mondora has developed a significant experience in the analysis and evolution of complex IT architectures, and in fostering convergence and alignment between IT and business. Mondora currently employs 40 people with a turnover of more than 2.5 million euros.

The Valtellina company was included as the Italian case of Teal organisation in the translation of Frederic Laloux's book "Reinventing organisations" for "the profound conceptual references that underlie their application on organisational culture, Rudolf Steiner's complete vision of the world and the developments most connected to the business and organisational world of Bernard Lievegoed and Otto Scharmer, but one can certainly also glimpse applications of Adriaan Bekman's theories on horizontal leadership [...]. The characteristics of a Teal company are all there. Absence of hierarchy in favour of self-organization; centrality of self-managed teams; organization as community and living organism; holistic vision. No staff functions, no job titles. Participatory" leadership, decisions can be made by anyone and power is also distributed. The metaphor that describes it is the living being. The main innovations are: self-organization, the concept of "wholeness" and organizational purpose. The sole maximisation of profit is not purpose; the organisation has the task of making individual development collide with the purpose that the company has set itself, cultivating all the dimensions of the human being: emotional, cultural and spiritual. In fact, the Mondora brothers' organization seems to embody the new Teal evolutionary paradigm [...] a new evolutionary leap in human consciousness, a seed of the future in the contemporary Italian context."

The interview

AR: Francesco, in your opinion, what is it that should jump more in the eyes of a visitor who entered your company for the first time? What would he notice first?

FM: I think he would notice first of all the glazing colors of the rooms of our headquarters, painted by most of ourselves, the climbing wall, the sofa to rest and the kitchen with its fridge where you can always find fruit, organic beer and other things to share. You will certainly notice the open spaces and the lack of individual offices: we decide when to sit down, if it happens even next to the CEO who even himself does not have an office of his own. This is what I think would be immediately perceptible of an organization that is globally centered on the person and on the 'purpose', characterized by a flat structure without managers and self-organizing teams.

AR: How do self-organized teams make decisions?

MM: There are two moments: the first is a kind of informal advice process that serves to share the opinions of each person on a given topic. In order to encourage collaboration between people, we use software tools that implement virtual forums (Loomio,Discourse) or simple chat on thematic channels (Slack). Anyone can propose a topic and everyone discusses it according to their interest and time availability. If a discussion has not followers, it means that the proposed topic is not relevant. The second moment is a decision meeting that delivers the decision in 20-30 minutes. There is a lot of consultation, even several times a day on particular issues, but once the consultation is over, the decision-maker takes responsibility for it as well.

AR: Michele seems that the cross or centralized functions have been replaced by IT tools, is this the case?

MM: Yes, in addition to the already mentioned Slack and Loom, we use the usual known Skype, Hangouts, Whatsapp and marginally the mail. On Slack, for example, we have a channel that everyone can write about if they want and with the utmost transparency, answers to questions sent automatically every day about the scheduled activities and the difficulties they encounter. On loomium we try to implement co-creation processes. All the opinions collected are public and I monitor them to help people solve the problems that arise from the discussions.

AR: On which areas can the self-organized teams decide?

FM: Teams spontaneously get together around a project, whether it's a job for a client or deciding on a company's goals or strategies. When we had to change the company's statute in order to transform it into a benefit company, we involved all our collaborators, with considerable surprise of the lawyer who followed us; normally, in fact, only the founding members were involved in these changes. Another example: the team decides for itself which suppliers it wants to buy from.

AR: So, in which way the budget is allocated to the teams?

FM: It is not assigned, in principle everyone can spend everything since we do not have middle managers delegated for spending. We are a company of adult people, everyone has access to financial information - the budget is published regularly on the internal forum - and resources are spent responsibly as if they were their own. Let's say that the budget is unique while its management is shared.

AR: If there are no middle managers, who interfaces with human resources, for example for hiring?

MM: We don't have an HR department: the self-organizing teams are autonomous in deciding on the hiring of a new colleague. There is no process of approval for the choice made by the team, the only rule that follows is that the newly hired for some aspect must be better than those who hire him. Since there is no HR and we do not have dedicated functions, the newcomer is required to take action to find independently the most appropriate point of the organization in which to fit. Everything you need to know about the operation of the company - from 'purpose' to policies on remote work, holidays, self-organization, working hours, etc.. the newcomer can be found in our handbook[1] published in open source.

AR: How are holidays and flexibility handled?

FM: The holidays available to each can be more than what is stipulated in the contract, in principle they are unlimited, but must be discussed within the team. In fact, it is the latter who bears the financial burden of holidays in excess of one of the components for which it is right that they should be shared. After all, there is no working time and it is possible to work from home, someone even works from abroad. Only new recruits are advised to come to the office for 'educational' reasons - it is much easier to learn by working with senior colleagues. I would say there is a lot of flexibility: starting last winter, every Thursday, if the weather allows, we go to the mountains in a shelter with wifi so we alter the work with nice skiing.

AR: What kind of integrations, incentives and bonuses are provided in relation to the basic salary?

MM: In principle, the wage is the salary itself that is fixed by the team i.e. there is nothing else. Obviously, we do not go below a minimum threshold, which in our case takes as a reference the standards of the Milan market and for those who are in Valtellina it is a good treatment. The problem with supplements, incentives and bonuses is that they lead in the opposite direction to the one we want to go. In our opinion, evaluations and feedback are not addressed to the individual but to the team's activity. However, we have a kind of variable benefit that is assigned to the team along with an expiration date. If the benefit is not distributed by that date, it returns to the company and is no longer assigned. There are also other forms of bonuses, - dinners at the restaurant, weekends at the spa, etc.. - The aim is to ensure that the employees' well-being is not an expectation or an automatic process, rather than an MBO.

AR: So there are no business goals and KPIs either?

FM: We are a benefit company and our corporate targets are not purely financial. Instead of KPIs we have OKRs - Objectives and Key Results - which however do not measure financial performance - although this is respectable when we look at our EBITDA[2]. One of the objectives, for example, is to total at least 200 km of monthly cycling trips per capita in order to obtain a 0.20 cents mileage reimbursement and promote health and physical exercise.

AR: Do these practices not lead to interpersonal conflicts?

MM: Occasionally conflicts can arise during the so-called team retrospective, a meeting that each group holds every two weeks to discuss the mistakes made. The idea is not to punish but to learn from one's mistakes by celebrating failures in order to avoid creating a witch-hunt climate. However, sometimes interpersonal frictions can emerge that the team tries to manage with a third party neutral with respect to the parties involved, damping the tones and making the parties understand their respective positions. Finally, an attempt is made to reach a shared agreement.

AR: Are there any 'social techniques' to optimize team management?

FM: We use a test and much dialogue to identify the prevailing temperament of people - choleric, bloody, phlegmatic and melancholic. A team made up without taking these factors into account can cause problems: if you put 4 phlegmics into an innovation team, you won't go anywhere.

AR: What other practices are used to allow Mondora to always be an 'company of adults'?

MM: First of all there are no titles and job descriptions, they are counterproductive. Some roles, however, emerge spontaneously in teams such as the project leader or the scrum master, the one who beats the tempo during each sprint and is the guarantor of the commitments made to the customer. But we are all developers and these roles are not fixed. There are also mutual coaching practices distributed between senior and junior collaborators, but not only. We also have mentors, people who help to spread an idea of horizontal leadership in the organization where the leader is at the service of his people and not just their boss. Another practice that helps build a sense of community and complements the aforementioned team retrospective is the company retrospective that is held every 6 months and takes place outside the workplace in a playful and informal environment. During this moment we try to meet ourselves again. Another important element not to be underestimated to support the culture are the tools such as Loomio and Officevibe. It is a tool for collecting anonymous feedback from a group of people. The service is on an external cloud owner of Officevibe whose archives are not accessible. I registered as a recipient of feedback so I can receive feedback from everyone and I can respond to people who posted them but I do not know who sent them, I see them as anonymous. It's a tool that has proved useful to measure the mood of the company and the results are really encouraging starting from the percentage of users: 97%! And the thing that Officevibe points out as most appreciated is just the possibility of self-organization.

AR: An organisation based on transparency and trust.

FM: Yes. We do not have confidential documents, everything is freely available on the internet although some documents clearly can not be changed. All employees can speak externally as spokespeople for the organisation, anyone can also deal with sales because we do not have any sales staff or a sales network and can do so independently.

AR: Also in the negotiation of the final price of the product with the customer?

MM: We have practices here too. First of all, we align ourselves with the prices of the best competitors who, like us, are focused on the needs of the end user, so since we are a company benefit, we take care of generating well-being or offer different prices based on how well we can bring to the customer or the ecosystem. Translated, we offer a 30% discount on software development depending on whether the company that commissions the work: 1. can document in writing the welfare it creates; 2. it is itself a company benefit; 3. the software product is then released in open source mode to free the work from intellectual property.

AR: Mondora.com as well as benefit company is also a B-corp. How did you get to this point and why?

FM: Organizatively, we maintained for a long time the pioneering phase of the beginnings in which there were no defined roles and even less an organization chart. B-corps have allowed us to 'certify' our organizational peculiarity with respect to more traditional approaches and to give space to our intention to create well-being within the territory in which we operate. Through phases of serious crisis we have also understood that in order to be altruistic externally it is first necessary to be profoundly selfish.

AR: Why the transformation into a company benefit?

MM: Until the law on benefit companies was passed in Italy, only profit or non profit existed. These two worlds were separate and the only way to transfer resources from the first to the second were at most donations or other similar forms. Benefit companies bring a completely new concept to themselves that solves the profit-non-profit antithesis by incorporating it right into the physical structure of the company - its statutes. The concept is profit yes but to create what? We want to use business as the driving force of Good and the legal form incorporates exactly this into the structure of an SB. If you're a B-corp and the next year you don't get the certification again from B-lab nothing happens. If you are an SB and you do not comply with what is stated in the statute as an ethical or social commitment or environmental you are violating the law as well as a false balance sheet. Being SB is much more challenging - there are no tax cuts either, and rightly so - and I think it is also important for consumers to be able to clearly distinguish who is doing what and how. Being an SB has also allowed us to maintain our specificity although since the beginning of 2016 we have been acquired by TeamSystem, a major player in management software in Europe. In spite of the acquisition, we maintained our status and legal form as SB.

AR: Your statutes speak of "producing well-being in the agricultural context of Valtellina, in order to favour the evolution of the primary sector for the benefit of the community". In concrete terms, what are you doing? Do you support local producers with donations?

FM: No, no charity at all. An initiative that we have been introducing for some time now involves, on the arrival of a new colleague, buying a form of Bitto, a very special Valtellina cheese obtained from the processing of cow's milk and freshly milked goat's milk still in the pastures. A form of Historical Bitto DOP can cost up to 1,500 € and be kept for 10 years. We buy it and during the on boarding ceremony of the newcomer we paint the shape with natural blueberry colors. The shape remains at the dairy that produced it and while it remains it acquires value. In fact, the owner of the form is not the company or the newly hired but the community that produced it. After 3 years we put it up for auction and with the proceeds the owner still reinvests in the primary sector by supporting other local projects. Then we hired a colleague from the company who works the land and produces fruit and vegetables for the rest.

AR: What does it mean to be the CEO of a company composed of adult people? What changes?

MM: To be precise, I'm not CEO but co-CEO of Mondora together with my brother Francesco. We decided in this way in order to avoid having a kind of "monarchy" at the top and to be able to compare ourselves all the time. Certainly, the thing that is most committed internally is to have the ability to abandon the mechanisms of command and control. What becomes important in an organization like ours is not making decisions flow, but creating the right environment through which they can emerge and spread. We need to become aware of the ecosystem that the organization is in fact, to bring the energies where they are needed, to create the right conditions. From this approach we derive practices like the one we have called "never my 2 cents", that is we avoid having to say always and anyway our opinion, especially if in the overall economy of the topic or decision in which we are involved the contribution would be marginal. Much more constructive not to agree to 100% than to cool the enthusiasm with continuous denials.

AR: Is there an attempt/danger of a regression towards forms of planning and control?

FM: I wouldn't say. The top-down approach is not very present and practically nothing is planned. In fact we try to prototype a lot and iterate the evidence, sensing & experimenting could be our motto.

AR: What kind of difficulties can emerge in a self-organizing organization?

MM: We say that excessive specialisation and concentration of skills should be avoided. The latter must be shared, and more than super-experts, we need people ready to take responsibility. An interesting polarity that actually emerges from the practices of self-organization, sees the individual in tension between the manifestation of his individual freedom and participation in the collective intelligence of the team, between you and you as a team. Both are important and necessary but a lot of individual development is needed to continuously find the balance between these opposites.

Notes:

[1] https://github.com/mondora/handbook

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earnings_before_interest,_taxes,_depreciation,_and_amortization