Learn how Holger Seim grew his knowledge product through growth hacking whilst building an innovative work culture through Holacracy. Find the first part of our interview with the Founder of Blinkist here: [ Ссылка ]

From exchanging school book notes in High School to using that same idea to build a phenomenal 1 million users strong B2C SaaS company, Holger Seim has seen and done it all. But what will strike you most about the cerebral founder of Blinkist is his willingness to share his vast ocean of knowledge with people who are just beginning (much like his blockbuster knowledge product), a quality amply highlighted with his belief of urging people to take the plunge and getting things done.

Here we ask him about the unique organizational management concept of Holacracy and how Blinkist successfully implemented it in their work structure.

Abhik - Whenever we read about Blinkist in the press, the concept of 'Holacracy' comes along with it. What exactly is Holacracy?

Holger - Holacracy, in general, is an operating system for an organisation which puts a lot of emphasis on self-organization and tries to remove managers.

When we started Blinkist, we started with a classical hierarchy structure that we learnt from companies we used to work for. But then at some point, we saw the shortcomings of such organisations. Workers were less motivated, then us founders would always be a bottleneck because we would always need to take all the decisions and sometimes we were not experienced enough or we did not have the right information to make the smartest decisions. We also faced politics coming our way. We weren't happy with this classic organisation anymore and we did some research on what else is out there. How could we not only build innovative products but also be an innovative organisation for which people want to work for? The result of this search was that we found Holacracy and we were very excited about it. The promise of management free organization, which works much more sufficiently, makes people engage with employees in a deeper way, we bought into it. We took some things which we liked and which we believed could solve problems that we faced. What we implemented was an organisation explicitly structured in circles where each circle has roles again. Each role can be energised by a person. As one person I have one or more roles and these roles are explicitly described somewhere. The advantage of this is that there are no implicit expectations and also this provides a lot of clarity regarding everyone’s role in the organization. With the implementation of this system, as a person I know this is what I am accountable for, this is my domain and I am allowed to make my own decisions within the purview of this domain. While defining respective roles and circles, this has also helped to empower people to make their own decisions because they now have more clarity about what they are responsible for. We also have a person who
coordinates the various circles, someone, who is more experienced and helps people by coaching them. Also, it is not a team leader who takes all the decisions but decision making is centralized among roles. The main thing for us is to empower people to take their own decisions and to let them organise themselves. The second thing we took from Holacracy was its meeting structure. Each circle has a tactical meeting every week which has a clear, structured agenda which makes sure that we meet everyone every week and all the relevant information flows for the purpose of achieving transparency. For taking the right decisions you need to have full information, be able to see the bigger picture. These tactical meetings ensure the receiving of right information from everyone and put pressure on circle leaders shoulders and put it on the organisation by having certain routines, so you do not need to have them in your head all the time. Each Circle has its own tactical every week, then super circles have them too which helps to create transparency for everyone. These two concepts are the most important and had the greatest impact on us. We also recently wrote an article about it in our magazine where we stepped a little bit away from Holacracy. We realised that when saying that we work by Holacracy and our company is inspired by it, our employees and people from outside were getting a different interpretation of this system. When different interpretations exist, it is hard to follow the consistent approach. So we decided to call it Blinkist’s operating system. We wrote down the core guiding principles and around it the processes and guidelines which would cover things we find important for implementation of this system. This created much more clarity among people. The core values allow employees to make their own right decisions and make them feel confident that they can make such decisions freely because it is line with our values.

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