Integrating Sustainable Practices with Innovative Ethical Models with Doug Kirkpatrick

**SPEAKER_2** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
Welcome back to the show. We're diving into the future of work and rolling up our sleeves to talk about self-managed environments and ethical leadership. I'm Stephen Sakach here with Mike Liwski and Tullio Siragusa. Tullio, could you please introduce our guest today?

**Tullio Siragusa** (0:34)
Absolutely. It will be my pleasure. Thank you, Stephen. So our guest today is Doug Kirkpatrick.
He's a distinguished thought leader in the future of work. In fact, Doug is an accomplished author, TEDx speaker, and has been recognized as an authority in the self-management and organizational movement. I'd actually say he's kind of royalty in that movement. But I'm biased because I've known Doug for almost seven years. So he co-founded the Morning Star Self-Management Institute, serves as a director for the Association for the Talent Development, and also known as the ATD. He's released his third book recently, The No Limits Enterprise, Organizational Self-Management in the New World of Work. He's also an Amazon bestseller with Forbes Books. He's the founder and CEO currently of D'Artagnan Advisors, helping companies embrace the future work. Now, Doug's extensive experience includes serving on leadership teams on the Open Leadership Network. He's pioneered invitation-based change, collaborating with organizations like Vibrancees, Great Work Cultures, and the Business Agility Institute to co-create the future of management. His groundbreaking work continues to inspire and shape the way we think about adaptive, ethical, empowered, and resilient organizations. So his insights really give a beautiful, powerful blueprint for building a future of work. It's not just about productivity, but about purpose, fulfillment, and meaningful impact, which is why we believe Doug makes a great guest for this podcast, as we work to help other organizations build love into scalable system, which is what Bliss stands for. Welcome to the show, Doug.

**Doug Kirkpatrick** (2:28)
Thank you so much, Tullio. I'm very humbled by that introduction, so I hope I can live up to the intro. Thank you.

**Mike Liwski** (2:38)
Doug and Tullio, Stephen, let's just get right into it. Doug, question for you. As Tullio mentioned, you've been an advocate for self-management for some number of years now. As we start to dig into that, could you tell us a little bit about your journey and let our listeners really know what inspired you to get into the advocacy for self-management?

**Doug Kirkpatrick** (3:05)
Thanks, Mike. I think the journey really began after college.
I met a young entrepreneur here in Northern California named Chris Ruffer, and he was on the verge of starting up a high-tech food manufacturing facility. I was very fortunate and privileged to meet him and learn about his project, and joined his project as a financial controller. And we started that company in the early 1980s, and it turned out to be quite successful. So the company reached about $100 million in sales, it had great quality, superb customers and marketing, it was quite successful from the outside. As we thought about the internal workings of the organization, we came to some realizations that it wasn't really as good as it could be. We realized that we had sort of defaulted to the traditional hierarchical bureaucratic management structure with which almost every company operated. So we had a pyramid, and our founder Chris was at the top of the pyramid. He was a managing partner. And then we had a layer of managers of which I was one. And we had, of course, a marketing manager, a production manager, quality manager, et cetera. And then we had a layer of supervisors who kind of oversaw the operations of the factory. And then below them, we had a layer of coordinators. And then below them, we had at the bottom of the pyramid, everyone who did the actual work of the enterprise. And so we were operating this manner for a few years. And one day Chris was looking at people coming into the parking lot, parking their cars, going to their workstations. And they just kind of had the insight that, you know, every one of those people is already a manager in their own personal lives. They're deciding gigantic life-altering decisions somehow on their own without a boss. Deciding who to date, who to marry, what to do for a living, whether to buy a house or have children or whatever. Somehow they make all these gigantic decisions without a boss. So that begs the question, if people know what to do at work and how to do it, why do they need a boss? A human boss. Then one day, he was signing checks. Our founder was signing checks. The way checks were generated is that supervisor would order a piece of equipment, for example, with a purchase order. Then we'd receive the equipment, we'd have a receipt and then an invoice would come in the mail, and then a clerk would match the documents together and produce checks for him to sign. One day, he was signing checks, came to one particular check for a piece of machinery, a pump, and realized that I'm adding zero value to this process. In fact, it's probably negative value because it's an opportunity cost, preventing me from doing more work. So he brought the stack of checks down to me and asked me to sign the checks. I said, yeah, sure, of course. So he would be free to do the strategic work for which he was being paid. So we just started collecting these insights that indicated, maybe there's a better way of working. So fast forward 1990, Chris had just left that original company and he started working on a project called Morning Star. And so at that point in early 1990, February of 1990, I joined him as a financial controller seeking new opportunities. And we had a core team of about 24 people. We were working out of a tiny farmhouse on a dusty canal bank here in Northern California, trying to build this factory in a short period of time. And one day, Chris came into the farmhouse and said, let's have a meeting of colleagues and talk about how to organize, because I've got some ideas I want to share. And of course, we said, sure. So we met at night in a double wide construction trailer out on the job site. And we sat around in a circle on folding chairs, and he handed out a document called the Morning Star Team Principles. And the principles basically boiled down to two things. First principle is don't use force or coercion against other human beings. And if you think about that principle, it's foundational to all law everywhere in the world. Every law against assault, battery, theft, burglary, kidnapping, murder, all the rest is predicated on that principle of no force. And the second principle was people should keep their commitments. If you say you're going to do something, you do it. And which principle is also foundational to law, especially contract law, which would mean nothing if parties didn't live up to their commitments. And so we discussed, the 24 of us, and debated, and had dialogue for a couple of hours. And finally, we just looked at each other around the circle and realized we had no objections to these principles. They're pretty much self-evident. And so we adopted them as the governance of the enterprise. And so when we walked out of that trailer at 9 o'clock at night, we were a self-managed organization at that moment. And we had a lot of work to do. So this was March of 1990 And we had a factory to build. And so we had thousands of acres of tomatoes coming up out of the ground, up and down the state of California, for hundreds of miles. We had to hire hundreds of people to operate the factory and drive the trucks. We had vital equipment arriving on ocean cargo freighters out in the Atlantic Ocean, waiting to go through the Panama Canal. And we had hundreds of contractors on the job site, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, constructing, fabricating, welding, pulling wire.