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Sounds Crazy, Let's Go!

The Brutally Honest Story of 10 Years Experimenting with Freedom, Equality, and Self-Management

leadership | self-management | strategy

“Sounds mad? Perhaps, but certainly worth reading!” – Otti Vogt, Co-Founder Global Society for Good Leadership

More than ten years ago, Jorn van der Schaaf had two ideas: wouldn’t it be a good idea to engage technical students to develop innovative solutions for companies and wouldn’t it make sense if the organization itself worked in an innovative, self-managing and experimental manner? The answer to those ideas became Ivy Global. Ivy has since grown to become a company of over 150 employees, winning several awards as one of the fastest growing organizations in the Netherlands.

Erik de Jong joined the company very early on and in his book, Sounds Crazy, Let’s Go! he describes a journey of experimentation with methods of self-management, decision-making, transparency, feedback, strategy, long-term goals, growth and profit sharing. Today, Ivy is an organization where employees can determine their own working hours, vacation days, salary and where the CEO is able to take a year-long sabbatical, knowing he leaves the company in good hands.

This is the book that Ivy could have used at the start, but the experiences, insights and personal reflections are now available for managers, entrepreneurs and companies that want to experiment with their salary model and self-management.

“The book’s strength lies, not in selling a perfect model but in its candor about what worked, what failed and what had to be let go. Insightful, practical and often funny, it gives others the courage to try new ideas and ask—and to keep asking—what organizational freedom is for and what it demands of us. Sounds mad? Perhaps, but certainly worth reading!” – Otti Vogt, Co-Founder Global Society for Good Leadership

“Erik reveals something that is rarely described with such honesty; that self-management doesn’t start by developing a perfect system but with the decision to focus on the people.” – Joost Minnaar, Corporate Rebels

“An organization is never finished, which is a good thing! That is why experimenting is the best thing an organization can do.” – Luuk Willems, Co-founder Semco Style Institute

Click here to download a preview of the book | Click here to download the factsheet

Published in October 2026 | Paperback | 208 pages | ca. 60,000 words

Full English translation available

Dutch edition published by Santasado

Click here to order the book at Amazon

Erik de Jong worked in secondment and at a digital marketing agency before joining Ivy Global in 2015, after owner Jorn van der Schaaf offered him an employment contract on a beer coaster that he couldn't say no to. Since then, he has started and guided dozens of experiments at Ivy. What that involves is hard to sum up in one sentence. It took him years to figure that out himself.

Erik studied Industrial Engineering and Management, found inspiration in thinkers like Ricardo Semler and Daniel Pink and discovered along the way that reading about self-management is a lot easier than putting it into practice.

Outside Ivy, Erik is married to Susan and father of Tijn and Sieb. He loves photography, exercising, and enjoys zombie movies, mostly because he is curious about how a collapsed world starts rebuilding itself and how people organise themselves once every structure falls away. Not all that different, really, from what he does at Ivy; just with fewer zombies.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword by Joost Minnaar
Why This Book
Introduction

Part 1 Freedom (2014–2019)
Experiment 1 Technical Projects with Students
Experiment 2 Secondment for a Fixed Monthly Fee
Experiment 3 Growing and Letting Go
Experiment 4 Radical Transparency
Experiment 5 Determining Your Own Salary

Part 2 Clarity (2019–2023)
Experiment 6 Working With a Framework
Experiment 7 Self-Managed Decision-Making
Experiment 8 The Capacity Meter
Experiment 9 The Tribal Council The Feedback Conversation
Experiment 10 The Participation Model
Experiment 11 The Ivy Salary Model
Experiment 12 When the Founder Walks Out the Door
Experiment 13 Split the Teams

Part 3 Development (2023–present)
Experiment 14 Strategic Intentions
Experiment 15 Speeding Up With the Ivy Circle
Experiment 16 Strategic Intention Teams
Experiment 17 Upgrading Our Operating System
Experiment 18 Profit-Sharing
Experiment 19 Looking for a New Salary Model

Afterword: It’s Not Done, But It’s Ours
Experiment 20 Writing a Book
About the Author

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