Rethinking our organization

Chinedu Echeruo is a serial entrepreneur based in New York. Among his many start-ups is HopStop, a transit navigation app he sold to Apple in 2013. organizations. Its goal is to align the way we dream, build and produce with a new, better form of capitalism.

Chinedu is a newly elected member of Ashoka's Entrepreneur-to-Entrepreneur Network, which brings together high-impact business entrepreneurs with the world's most powerful social entrepreneurs at Ashoka. We recently talked about what he's learned and why he's calling his new venture Beloved Ecosystem.

Konstanze Frischen: Chinedu, you think that society, as a classic form of human organization, has somehow passed its due date. Can you tell us more?

Chinedu Echeruo: Of course. Just for context, there are different theories about the purpose of businesses, but the most common is about organizational efficiency: having a business or corporation is a very efficient way to get organized. But it's not fixed. This may change with technology and new methods or information flows. We don't need to have large organizations; these have proven to be the most effective systems for organizing ourselves. But the challenge with these systems is that sometimes they decouple from what we really want. This is what is happening in our world today. So I think we now need to rethink the organizational design and align it with how we want the world to be.

Frischen: Helping people find a better way forward was at the heart of HopStop, your navigation app.

Echeruo: That's right! I grew up in Nigeria and always got lost in our house there. And it's not because we had this lavish residence, I was just really bad with directions. Then, when I was 16, I moved to the United States and then to Brooklyn to work on Wall Street after college. Imagine me in New York, in the maze of the subway, in this complex maze of tunnels and streets. It was terrifying. But the triggering moment was after a few years, when I got lost on a date. I don't remember exactly how the date went, but I know what I did the next morning. I got off at the subway station, pulled out a subway map, put it on the floor of my apartment, and said, "How would I describe a subway system to a programmer, who can then write some kind of algorithm to solve this, to help me get from point A to point B? I didn't know how to code, so I found a developer in Russia. And for four years, district by district, train by train, stop by stop, we built HopStop, which was eventually sold to Apple, and by then I think we had included about 300 or 400 cities, plus bus stops and bike lanes.< /p>

Frischen: So your frustration led to a useful product for everyone.

Echeruo: Yes. At the heart of every great product is a psychological need. That's what HopStop solved; my own very deep longing, my fear of being spatially lost. And that was something that just looking at my height and weight, you couldn't tell. But this psychological need is encoded or embodied in the notion of history. Everyone yearns for a story to come true, whether it's what they want to have lunch or what empire they want to build with their life. So essentially what I'm suggesting is that the goal of our organizational design should be to make these human stories come true.

Frischen: Since humans have diverse and fluid needs, does that mean the future of the organization will be agile and smaller? You were sort of alluding to the fact that organization size is obsolete because technology allows us to organize ourselves in new ways.

Echeruo: Yes. It's part of the work that my partner and I did at the Love & Magic Company, to rethink what another form of organization could be. We called it the Beloved Organization. You can think of it as a loosely coupled decentralized system of agents, or teams, with three core principles. The first is to align the organization with delivering human stories. The second is to take advantage of these decentralized teams. And the third principle is to maximize the speed of information flow.

Frischen: And what does that look like in practice? Are you building your next organization on these principles?

Echeruo: Yes. When George Floyd's death occurred, it was clear to me that at the heart of social unrest is wealth inequality. We have t...