Metasystems: How trust can change the world

TABLE

of contents

Personal Stories

A word from the authors

Foreword - Marcus Freeman

Once upon a time...

PART I.

THE PARADIGM SHIFT

Chapter 1 The state the world is in (spoiler: it’s a mess)

Chapter 2 The truth? You can’t handle the truth

Chapter 3 Building bridges

Chapter 4 Meta is the new black

PART II.

METASYSTEMS

Chapter 5 Meta what? System who?

Chapter 6 The Holy Grail: trust

Chapter 7 Core, extended core, moonshot

Chapter 8 The partnership pyramid

Chapter 9 A Minimum Viable Partnership

Chapter 10 The benefits, aka 1+1=5

Chapter 11 The Achilles Heel

PART III.

THE METASYSTEM WHEEL

Chapter 12 The power of purpose

Chapter 13 The power of collaboration

Chapter 14 The power of culture

PART IV.

LEADING IN THE AGE OF METASYSTEMS

Chapter 15 Leading in the age of metasystems

Chapter 16 Partnership manager

Chapter 17 The partnership charter

Chapter 18 A trustful partnership agreement

PART V.

THE STORY OF THE STORY

Epilogue

Sources

We share to shape

PERSONAL

STORIES

This book came alive through collaboration and partnerships

In 2019, we both started to gravitate towards the belief that true and trustful collaborations would be the engine for companies to find a new way of working. We saw the possibility and necessity of an alternative to the sky-bound curve, always hungry for growth, that has dictated business for the past century.

As we bounced ideas back and forth and connected thoughts to form grander viewpoints, we decided to co-author this book, proving our point that collaboration results in more than either of us could have achieved alone. As writing together is also about finding ways to merge two different writing styles, we decided to find a partner to help us write this story. Annelies Desmet agreed to become our ghostwriter. But instead of just writing down our ideas, Annelies quickly became a story-board, a challenger of our thoughts and the third voice in this narrative. Annelies became a true partner, and we want to thank her (and her colleague Jill) enormously for the amazing work they’ve done, and for taking this journey with us.

Our colleagues have been great story-partners in helping us with research, creating visuals and fine tuning the overall picture. Thanks a lot to Emily De Baets, Samuel Eggermont, Jeremy Denisty and Francesco Cilurzo. A special thanks to our business partner Jo Caudron for the reflections, thoughts and challenging conversations.

We would also like to thank our clients Jan Dewitte (CIO Unilin) and Dirk Oosterlinck (Group Director Business Development, Marketing & Innovation at Mensura) for being early believers and for challenging our first versions of partnership strategy.

Thanks also to Liesbeth Declercq, our publisher at die Keure, for the trust in our partnership and all the help in the creation of this new project together.

Last but not least, we want to thank the people we interviewed for sharing their insights on partnerships and ecosystems. Thank you for your collaboration and transparency. Your stories were inspirational and helped us to structure our ideas: Jonathan Berte (Founder Robovision), Osvald Bjelland (CEO Xynteo), Chris Burggraeve (Former CMO AB InBev), Sacha Buyck (Country Manager bol.com Belgium), Marco Derksen (Digital Strategist), Fredo De Smet (Curator, writer & DJ), Olaf Hermans (Cognitive scientist, PhD Penn State University), Carla Hilhorst (EVP R&D Foods & Refreshment at Unilever), Jurgen Ingels (Founding Partner SmartFin Capital), Rudy Moenaert (Professor of Strategic Marketing – TIAS), Saher Sidhom (Founder Hackmasters), Peter Somers (CEO Emirates Post), Stijn Swijns (Former Special Forces Operator and Founder of MissionMe) & P., Jacques Vandermeiren (CEO Port of Antwerp), Ann Van Dessel (SVP and Head Global Clinical and Regulatory Operations at Johnson & Johnson).

A WORD

FROM THE

AUTHORS

By Nils van Dam

I learned the pleasures and challenges of working together from a very tender age. In Antwerp, where I grew up, my parents were always out and about. So was I. In those days, young children followed their parents around to make and meet friends. Doing things together was just the way things went. Summers were even more about friendship. Year after year, I’d stay with my grandparents in Oude Wetering, in North Holland for two whole months. With about fifty other families, my grandparents lived in an isolated neighborhood, separated from the rest of the village by a canal and the polder. I was a city boy, but nonetheless as much a part of this small rural community as the next person. Here, everybody knew everybody, and we all worked together when the task at hand was more than one man could handle. Every August, youths would gather to harvest the hay and store it in bales, making a huge haystack – the best place ever to build a camp in. And every time our neighbor’s cows broke through the wooden gates and escaped to the surrounding fields, we’d help to get them back in their pasture.

Fast forward a decade or two. As I started working at Unilever right after finishing my Master’s in Commercial Engineering, I recognized that same spirit of collaboration there. Here, too, I felt in my colleagues a desire to be part of society, to contribute to it. My job was to manage Becel, a margarine which provided people with cholesterol issues a healthy solution. I enjoyed long-term collaborations with the Belgian Cardiologic Liga and several cardiology professors in Brussels, Leuven and Antwerp. In September 1986, I organized the first run of the Antwerp 10 miles. It was called Becel 10 miles at that time. We counted 800 participants. A small event, nonetheless involving a lot of orchestration with city officials and the Antwerp police force. I was a big believer in connecting healthy food to a healthy lifestyle. When I moved to a new job, this experiment was stopped. Luckily for Antwerp and its joggers, it was picked up by Golazo and became the huge success we all know today.

Many years later, I had a similar experience in my role as global vice president Family Brands, still at Unilever. Working with the World Food Program, among others, we drew up an ambitious plan to support the funding of school meals for primary schools in developing countries. After some initial successes, we struggled to embed this program in a sustainable business model. When I switched jobs – something that, on average, happens every three to four years in big corporates – the program was stopped. Luckily, it was picked up by the global Unilever Sustainable Living Plan (USLP) later on.

History seemed to be repeating itself. I learned that partnering works well to create a bigger impact and that collaboration is fun, but that it depends on personal relationships.

When Dado and I decided to write this book together, it was because we noticed most businesses grow stronger through collaboration or by being part of a larger network. My trip to China in 2019, exposed me, firsthand, to the power of ecosystems. Visiting Alibaba, Tencent, Walmart and several stores in Shanghai and Shenzhen the opportunities for companies to collaborate more became very visible.

When we set off, our book focused on the opportunities offered by different forms of collaboration, to show others the best way to select and grow partnerships and ecosystems. We found out soon enough that we needed to focus much more on the key ingredient for building long-term partnerships, the maker or breaker: trust. Our book started evolving from an insightful technical guide on partnerships to a holistic, more philosophical manifesto on how to create sustainable systems. I became very aware that the pendulum of headcount reduction, automation and dehumanization of business into efficient processes has gone too far. The solution lies in dialing up the human factor again. Paradoxically, the comeback of the heart and soul of businesses will be made possible thanks to the development of artificial intelligence, as AI will take over meaningless jobs and give us back the time to connect with others.

We need to do much more thinking on the human side of doing business, we’ve been neglecting this side in the past decade, almost to the point of forgetting it altogether. It’s been inspiring to discover we can flip the model of collaboration again – making it more connected, patient and empathic.

I’ve learned that in life you want to surround yourself with partners, not winners, and so you have to be one yourself. I would like to thank my partner in life, my wife Peggy, for the support she gave me while I was writing this book. Her casual comments, her care and her empathy have influenced this book more than she realizes. I would also like to thank Dado. His positive energy is contagious and his experience in writing books indispensable in making me not get lost in the process. I would also like to thank my good friends, my family for the good conversations on several occasions and for testing some of my ideas; in many cases being unaware that they were guinea pigs for my ideas. I finally would like to thank all my coaches in my career, they were my bosses, they were my colleagues, they were my teammates and my employees. They were a constant source of ideas and of setting the example. This book is a humble extract of all the wisdom they have passed on.

By Dado Van Peteghem

Partnerships and collaboration have been a constant throughout my career. My very first job was to manage a project called Future Talking: an online research community with more than 1,000 Belgian citizens who were invited to exchange ideas on the future of our society. It was a multi-client study involving ten different companies, led by a partnership between InSites Consulting – the company I was working for – and One Agency, an innovative web agency led by Jo Caudron, who would later on become my compagnon de route.

From this first experience in 2007, I learned how valuable complementary partnerships can be, and how powerful their combined networks are. Five years later, I ran into Jo again at a market research event. We picked up the conversation right where we’d left off and went on to find our current company. Then and there, serendipity and trust were already at the heart of our decisions.

Two years into our collaboration, Jo and I wrote one of the first books on digital transformation, a story which brought me to Dubai. I was asked for a keynote speech by the Chalhoub Group, one of the leading luxury companies of the Middle East. We started a project together which ended in a partnership and a joint venture. Thanks to the Chalhoub Group and their extended family, I grew to understand how trust and respect are quintessential to success. Many of the collaborations in the Chalhoub Group have crossed three generations, illustrating the long-term mindset that is needed for true trustful partnerships.

Later still, I teamed up with Omar Mohout to write a book on corporate venturing and how large corporations can accelerate growth by collaborating with startups. We described the power of collaboration between the big motherships and speedboats to foster innovation and agility. We used the metaphor of the connected fleet, where the mothership works with the surrounding speedboats to make their way to the same North Star.

Working with Nils now, we started to see the potential of a ‘fleet of fleets’, one in which big players don’t just work with smaller ventures, but where giants also partner up to create much more leverage together. Not just commercially, but to work towards a shared purpose.

It is my true belief that large-scale companies won’t be able to survive on their own in this challenging century. This fast-turning world is just too complex to navigate by yourself. Companies need to connect, to engage with the community, to immerse themselves in the rising ecosystems, to reach out for collective intelligence and innovation and – above all – to scout for ‘partners in purpose’.

In early 2020, I was invited to speak at the University of Vilnius, a city whose people left a long-lasting impression on me. After my keynote, there was a panel conversation with, among others, Saher Sidhom, who runs an innovation business from London. I’m not building a company, he told me. I’m building a network. Moving forward, I think this should be the mindset, both for individuals and for companies. Your most valuable asset in business is your network. Invest in it so you can unleash its power when you need it the most.

Like Steve Blank told the startup world: get out of the building! Let’s connect. After all, the future is something we’ll have to build together.

"Be slow to fall into

friendship; but when

thou art in, continue

firm and constant."

SOCRATES

I want to thank Nils for being a great partner in creating this story together. His ability to quickly absorb, make things concrete and to redefine the perspective are inspirational. While writing a book you need someone who pushes the envelope.

Thanks also to my friends and family for being great partners on my journey, especially during the challenging start of this new decade both personally and professionally. A special mention to my kids Milou and Noah, who inspire me every day in their partnership through childhood. Connection with other people is ultimately what gives you the strength to persist.

Writing this book during the COVID-19 crisis

At the time of writing, the corona pandemic suddenly threw all of us smack into a worldwide crisis. We spent weeks in quarantine and applied social distancing to flatten the curve and minimize the chance of spreading infection. The virus unleashed chaos in our lives and businesses alike. All those companies with their beautiful and ambitious PowerPoint full of plans for the future, found themselves facing an unforeseen blow. The economic impact created by the Coronavirus will amount to something we probably haven’t seen since the early 1900s.

Collectively cornered, we started looking for new paths to follow. As with any other crisis, though, it turned out that this pandemic had some positive effects too. The silver lining of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the spontaneous and global rise of partnerships guided by solidarity and a common purpose.

Digital transformation was adopted across organizations, almost overnight. Suddenly, companies needed to speed up their teleworking capabilities to facilitate employees working from home. Everybody stepped up their e-commerce game, doubling their home delivery efforts, reinventing their communication formats, using live streams, webinars and virtual workshop environments to their full potential, often for the first time. This digital shift was a sudden one, and it counts as a giant leap forward.

Corona initiated one of the biggest periods of standstill companies and people have ever experienced. Our mindset evolved, and our actions followed suit. This freed up space for more creativity, but also prompted moments of reflection on how we value time and organize our lives. People changed their schedules as well as their consumption patterns. The debate on ‘local and small’ versus ‘constantly bigger and more global’ was revived and reviewed, now interpreted from a whole new perspective.

During this crisis, it has been fascinating to see organizations large and small team up to find and deliver solutions. Scientists around the world started working together on a scale never seen before. SMEs gathered in networks to give back to the community. Large corporations, even the die-hard competitors, formed alliances to offer help. Retailers worked together to deliver food to healthcare workers, luxury companies collaborated to manufacture hand sanitizers, media publishers collectively removed their paywalls, and tech companies collaborated to help children learn from home. And countries worked together across the globe to provide medical supplies, money and support to one another.

COVID-19 taught us that with a shared enemy, we are able to form partnerships that transcend purely economic drives. While we prefer a common goal instead of a shared enemy, we did show that we are perfectly capable of setting up partnerships that organically fold into networks composed of unusual nodes, that go beyond profit. Yes, we can.

"There is immense

power when a group

of people with similar

interests gets together

to work toward the

same goals."

IDOWU KOYENIKAN

FOREWORD

MARCUS

FREEMAN

Dear Reader

This innovative book on Partnerships will challenge you to think again about how businesses interact. It will show you that what we think of as business partnerships are generally very shallow and that, therefore, they are not very effective or even value accretive. In other words, today we have a suboptimal situation for your business, for other businesses and society as a whole. Dado and Nils will help you to explore how your company is structured, to reflect on what its purpose should be, and even what ‘value’ actually is. You will see that if you think ‘value’ is just about profit, then you’ve really missed the point. The authors convey the optimistic message that if we go beyond the walls of our own metaphysical walled business gardens, we will all benefit.

This book is full of striking cultural references: from Socrates to the Simpsons, from Daft Punk to Descartes. If you know where to look there are even hidden Spotify playlists, I kid you not…

And yet, a couple of key figures are not referred to, even if their ghosts loom large. They are Adam Smith and Karl Marx. Smith is seen as the theoretical father of modern capitalism where self-interest, even self-love, lead to the unintended consequence of economic growth for the good of society, through the profit motive. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith says that man can have but few friends and yet needs the cooperation of multitudes, so economic man is tricked into cooperation through seeking his own benefit and appealing to that of others.

Even as a capitalist myself, I’ve always thought that a resolutely depressing view of human nature…

Marx on the other hand, starts from the fact that man is a social animal as he puts it in Capital. He writes that when a human co-operates systematically with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species. Further, Marx writes in his Theses on Feuerbach: The human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations.

Spoiler alert: this book is Marxist!

Dado and Nils will show you that we should collaborate, not for the profit motive but for a greater purpose because as humans together we realize our potential as species-beings, as Marx put it, through wide collaboration. The good news, though, for those who baulk at reading a Marxist business book is that profit for our businesses will ensue. We will grow the pie together through the Metasystems that Dado and Nils describe, the profit we create together will be equitably distributed, and we will also benefit our wider communities.

That’s quite a project, and much more interesting than most dry business books…

I first met Dado Van Peteghem in 2017. My group, the Chalhoub Group which is a luxury retail group headquartered in the Middle East, had booked Dado as keynote speaker to talk to our strategy committee about Digital Transformation which was already the buzzword at the time.

I must say I was not very impressed with our choice: what could a young Belgian guy in his mid-thirties from an unknown consulting firm based in Ghent (where is that?) tell US about Digital Transformation. I was thinking to myself that we probably chose him because McKinsey was too expensive…

Anyway, Dado made his presentation, and what I liked immediately was that instead of spouting platitudes and generalities as you find in so many op-ed pieces, Dado set out a framework allowing our group (and any other) to measure its digital readiness and the skill-gaps. I was impressed. We asked Dado and Nils’s consulting firm, now known as Scopernia, to pitch against the usual consulting suspects to accompany our project of Digital Transformation. They won.

The reason they won was one of the reasons this book is so valuable. Many consulting firms explain to you what you are doing wrong, they then sell you further projects to put it right. Their own interest is both to help you (good for their credentials to get other clients), but also to make you dependent