HOME | BOEKEN | AUTEURS | OVER SANTASADO | AGENCY | CONTACT

Sounds Crazy, Let's Go!

FOREWORD BY JOOST MINNAAR

November 2025, Barcelona, 4:00 a.m.

I can't sleep. Our flight back to the Netherlands leaves in a few hours, but I'm still standing in the club (Apollo, for those who know it), close to my old student home, back from when I did my Master's in Nanotechnology in Barcelona. It feels like a previous life, but a few things are still familiar. Just like then, the techno beats are pounding through my body and I can smell beer and tequila.

Why am I telling you this? Because somewhere in the crowd in front of me, a few of the Ivy Global crew are on the dance floor, laughing, dancing, shouting over the music. Not like colleagues on a business trip, but like friends. That is the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Ivy. This doesn't feel like a company where everyone happens to work well together, it feels like a group of friends who happen to run a company.

We're in Barcelona for the second Corporate Rebels Summit, the yearly gathering of people from our Rebel Cell network, some hundred companies that believe work can be fundamentally different and can prove it. The first gathering was a year earlier in Seville, which Erik will tell you more about later in this book. By day the conversation is about self-management, ownership and the future of organisations. By night, it’s about good people and a party.

I had known Ivy's founder, Jorn, for a while already. We first met a few years earlier in Veldhoven, in the shadow of ASML, at a local Rebel Cell meeting. He was there as a participant, curious, with strong opinions and with the energy of someone who isn't done with anything yet. I started following Ivy after that, and the more I saw, the more this Dutch company without a formal boss began to fascinate me.

It definitely wasn't the first self-managing company I had encountered. Since co-founding Corporate Rebels about ten years ago (not coincidentally in Barcelona and not on a beer coaster), we've visited and studied more than two hundred similar companies. We weren't specifically looking for self-managing companies. We were looking, and still are, for companies where people enjoy going to work and are also financially successful. We learned that most of those companies practice self-management, not as a goal in itself but as a means, as an answer to the question of how you keep people engaged in what they do.

We found self-management in every shape and flavour and in every part of the world, but Ivy's story stuck with me. Unfinished as it was, I really related to this company because it dared to be so honest about itself and because, in this story, I kept seeing the three things I see in all the companies where self-management works: equality, trust and freedom.

Equality

I just described Ivy as a big group of friends but don't get me wrong, that doesn't mean everyone is equal. So what are they then? Equivalence is about treating each other as responsible adults, individuals who have their own judgment and can be held accountable for it.

That may sound obvious but it isn't. Most organisations have an inequality built in so deeply that nobody sees it anymore; the manager knows better and decides, the employees listen and execute. Ivy tries to structurally break that inequality, not by making everyone the same, but by treating everyone as equal.

Trust

The fact that Ivy is essentially a big group of friends doesn't mean there are no leaders. In fact it's the opposite, everyone can, and must, be a leader. Sometimes you lead, sometimes you follow, depending on the situation and who has the most to offer at that moment; easier said than done. Following other people only works if there is trust and, as we all know, trust takes years to build and is gone in seconds.

Erik puts it well, "Self-management only works once trust in the collective outweighs the fear of not having a leader." I had to read that sentence a few times before I fully understood it; then I realised that is about as true as it gets.

Freedom

Freedom is probably the word that resonates most with people. No boss means freedom but no boss doesn't mean no structure and no agreements. Erik writes, "You can absolutely live without a boss, but not without agreements," and "Structure isn't a limitation. It's a precondition for self-management." Without structure and agreements, you don't just get freedom. You probably get chaos, informal minor bosses or simply a complete standstill.

At Ivy, they understand that all too well. They show that self-management isn't the absence of structure and process but a different kind of structure and process. Roles, frameworks, decision-making protocols, transparent salary models, this book is full of them and not without reason. Structure is necessary but self-management isn't only about having the right structures; people also need to know how to use those structures to feel free.

That is the most important lesson we learnt ourselves at Krisos, our impact fund where, alongside Corporate Rebels, we put into practice what we write and speak about. By now we've bought several small and medium-sized Spanish manufacturing companies (in Seville and Barcelona) and modified them in the direction of self-management. The biggest challenge is always the same; how do you train people to work within that freedom?

NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE FREEDOM

The German-American psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm described this problem back in 1941. He drew a distinction between negative and positive freedom. Negative freedom is the absence of control, rules, a boss watching over your shoulder. Positive freedom is the capacity to act from within yourself, to take the initiative and to feel responsibility as something that comes from inside, rather than being imposed from outside.

Creating negative freedom is what most self-managing companies do and it’s not difficult. You remove the manager or you never hire one. You scrap the approval rounds and formally give people space. However, most people grow up in a world of bosses, performance reviews and dependency, so they don't turn into independent professionals who effortlessly take ownership overnight. Turning negative freedom into positive freedom takes time, attention, personal growth and a deliberate investment in the people themselves, not just in the structures around them.

Reading this book, you'll see how Ivy learned this the hard way. It is filled with a sense of frustration based on the fact that freedom can also mean confusion and that self-management doesn't automatically produce ownership. Ivy had to discover most of this for themselves. But I digress, back to the book.

INTERESTING BECAUSE IT IS UNFINISHED

While most books about self-management revolve around theory or some framework, this book is different. This book starts on a terrace with a beer coaster, a founder for whom freedom is more important than anything else and, most important, it starts with a lot of trust. That is exactly why it's so valuable.

What Erik shows in this book is something rarely described so honestly. Self-management doesn't start with the perfect system, but with a human choice, the choice to take people seriously as thinking, responsible professionals. And making that choice, every single day, requires huge investments from the founder, the colleagues and the organisation as a whole.

The twenty experiments Erik describes are not success stories. Some experiments worked, some didn't, many were revised later and that honesty is exactly what makes this book so valuable. As Erik says, self-management isn't a final destination, it's a way of constantly being underway, falling down and getting back up.

That is what sets Ivy's story apart from many other self-managing companies; the willingness to admit you got it wrong. Most progressive companies cherish their origin story, a founder with a vision, a turning point, an organisational model that clicked into place all at once. That story is carefully maintained, because it provides identity and safety, but the downside is that it also creates a blind spot. You see things that confirm what you already believe and you see less clearly what is not working.

Ivy has that story too, the beer coaster, Ricardo Semler as inspiration, the dream of an organisation without a boss. But what this book shows and what really matters, is that Ivy has been willing, again and again, to revise that story. The shift towards more trust, more freedom and more equality isn't a passing trend, it's an answer to the way most companies organise work; an answer to a crisis of disengagement with little to no purpose. Companies that take self-management seriously, not as a marketing story but as a daily practice, are better equipped for the future.

Ivy is that kind of organisation, unfinished, underway, and precisely because of that, worth learning from. So if you're an entrepreneur who wants to know how to build an organisation without becoming the boss yourself, read this book. If you're someone who wonders whether work could be different, read it. If you're a researcher trying to understand what self-management looks like in practice, then definitely read it.

Not because Ivy is the perfect example. Perfection was never the point. The point is to start and to go on the journey.

Joost Minnaar
Co-founder Corporate Rebels & Krisos

WHY THIS BOOK

Early in 2024, I helped another company that was wrestling with self-management and shaping their salary model. They wanted to try the Ivy way of working and were curious how we handled certain things. Then more and more companies started showing up, wanting to hear how we did things.

What struck me was that they were wrestling with exactly the same things we were ten years ago. They wanted to work in a self-managing way, they believed in it but the question remained; how to do it? It’s obvious that consulting with an organisation that is further along helps enormously, something we didn't have that back then. We had to figure it out by experimenting, falling down, getting up, trying again and again. And that is the reason for this book.

Not because we know everything. Quite the opposite, indeed for a long time I thought we should not write this book. Who are we to tell other people about self-management? We do a lot of things well, but we're far from perfect. Then my colleague, Maarten Reith, asked me a simple question, "Do you think we'll be a structured, well-oiled machine in ten years?"

I laughed and my immediate answer was, "No. I hope not." I hope we stay an organisation that experiments, that learns, that keeps changing; an organisation where mistakes are allowed and new things get tried.

That is when it clicked. We get to share this story precisely because we're not perfect.

This is the story of Ivy Global, written by a lot of people, in a lot of different ways, written through ideas, experiments, feedback, doubts and the initiative to do it a little better each time. I wrote it down, but it belongs to all of us, because this is the book we would have wanted to read ten years ago.

Self-management sounds great, until you have to share your own little kingdom. Making decisions together sounds amazing, until you're drowning in every big and small decision. Transparency sounds bold, until it's about your own salary. Freedom feels fantastic, until nobody quite knows who is responsible for what anymore.

With Ivy, we built an organisation without bosses, where everyone can work their own way. We try new things, we make decisions together and constantly experiment with freedom, responsibility and, maybe the scariest part, setting each other's salaries.

That produced some good things. As a self-managing organisation we won an award as one of the fastest-growing companies in the Netherlands and received multiple nominations for the Zero Distance Excellence Awards. However, there was also doubt, hassle, uncomfortable conversations and moments when you thought; could someone remind me why we’re doing this?

"Sounds crazy, let's do it", isn't a slogan we came up with, it's just what happened. Someone would suggest an idea, something that in most companies would get killed on the spot with a risk analysis or a PowerPoint about stakeholder support, and we would think, yeah, that’s a crazy idea. Let's do it.

That is the pattern behind almost every experiment in this book. We don't experiment because we're so brave, but because we built an organisation that doesn't immediately snuff out that kind of initiative, an organisation that makes room to try something, even if it might not work. Sounds crazy, let's do it, became a kind of mantra for the attitude behind the crazy ideas and the willingness to try something. For the trust that the people around you won't think, here we go again, but instead will think, that’s interesting, let's see where it gets us.

STRUCTURE

In this book I'll take you, roughly chronologically, through our development and experiments. We start with a lot of freedom and very little structure, gradually discover that freedom without boundaries doesn't work and then build, step by step, a way of working together that keeps getting more mature.

Along the way you'll experience everything, from working with a framework and radical transparency, to setting our own salaries, building a salary model and reorganising teams. I’ll show what worked, what didn't work and why. I’ll use real-life examples, sometimes going into detail, so you understand how the example works and can translate it to your own experiments.

Think of this book as a look into our steps toward self-management, influenced by others (like Tuff, Unblock and Baarda), but mostly, what we made of it in practice. Ivy’s story and experiments are not meant to be copied, but to provide inspiration for your own experiments. Adopt what works for you, leave out what doesn't fit and make it your own, so it works for you or your organisation.

Throughout the book you'll also find contributions from people who personally experienced part of this story, as colleagues or as advisors. They enhance my perspective, sometimes correct it, and show that there is more than one side to every story. Self-managing works for us and we're seeing it work for more organisations worldwide. Whether it works for you is something only you can decide.

Good luck and enjoy the journey.

Click here to download the preview as a pdf file

Order the book at Amy en Eva | Amazon | Managementboek.nl | bol.com | Libris.nl | Bruna.nl | Zoek een boek | Athenaeum/Scheltema | Donner