Rethinking how we organize ourselves

Chinedu Echeruo is a serial entrepreneur from New York City. His many start-ups include HopStop, a navigation app he sold to Apple in 2013. Most recently, he has intensified his study of natural sciences, particularly physics, in a quest to redesign organizations. His 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 influential corporate 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.

Constance Frischen: Chinedu, you believe that the business, as a classic form of human organization, has somehow passed its expiration date. Can you explain that?

Chinedu Echeruo: Secure. Just for context, there are several theories about why businesses exist, but the most common is about organizational efficiency: that having a business, or a business, is a very efficient way of organizing. But that is not set in stone. It can change with technology and new ways or information flow. We do not to have have large organizations; those happen to be the more efficient systems to organize ourselves into. But the challenge with those systems is that they sometimes disconnect from what we really want. That is what is happening in our current world. So what I think we need now is to rethink the design of the organization and align it with how we want the world to unfold.

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

Echeruo: That’s true! I grew up in Nigeria and I was always getting lost in our house there. And it’s not because we had this palatial residence, I was just really bad with the directions. When I was 16, I moved to the United States and then to Brooklyn to work on Wall Street after college. Picture me in New York City, in the maze of the subway system, in that complex labyrinth of tunnels and streets. It was terrifying. But the exciting moment was after a few years when I got lost on a date. I can’t remember exactly how the date went, but I know what I did the next morning. I went to the subway station, took out a subway map, put it on the wooden 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 problems? help you get from point A to point B?” I didn’t know how to code, so I found a developer in Russia And over four years, borough by borough, train by train, stop by stop, we built HopStop, which was eventually sold to Apple. time had included some 300 or 400 towns, including bus stops and bike routes.

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

Echeruo: Yes. At the heart of any great product is a psychological need. That’s what HopStop solved; my own very deep longing, my fear of being lost in space. And that was something you couldn’t know just by looking at my height and weight. But that psychological need is encoded or embodied in the idea of ​​a story. Everyone strives for a story to come true, whether it’s what they want to eat for lunch or what empire they want to build with their lives. So essentially what I’m proposing is that the goal of our organizational design should be to make those human stories come true.

Frischen: Given that people have diverse and changing needs, does this mean that the future of organizations is flexible and smaller? You sort of alluded to the size of the organization becoming obsolete because technology allows us to organize in new ways.

Echeruo: Yes. That’s part of the work 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 to deliver human stories. The second is to leverage these decentralized teams. And the third principle is to maximize the flow of information.

Frischen: And what does it look like in practice? Will you build your next organization on these principles?

Echeruo: Yes. When George Floyd died, it was clear to me that wealth inequality is at the heart of social unrest. We need to close that economic gap. That’s what I’m trying to do with the next startup I’m building, a company called the Beloved Ecosystem. Because what I’ve seen isn’t going to change those economic metrics much. And the reason there has been no substantial progress in wealth creation since the death of George Floyd is because of its complexity. So the question is, how do you design something that can transform human life on a massive scale? And there are recent advances in statistical physics that make it possible for the first time to reason how to design for these complex systems. That’s something we should all be jumping about and dancing in the street because finally we have a way to reason about something we couldn’t reason about before.

Frischen: Can you summarize these advances in statistical physics?

Echeruo: The core advance was given to us by a man named Richard Feynman. He received his PhD from Princeton and won the Nobel Prize in Physics. His work enables us to make predictions about systems and how they will develop in the future. To understand complex systems, we need to understand why motion happens. And the great thing about physics is that it deals with the movement of things, including people. So in physics we can find an answer to why people move the way they do. Once you go down that road, certain answers become mathematically obvious.

Frischen: What are those answers?

Echeruo: It’s all about reducing the entropy in the system. The goal of any organization is to reduce entropy, to collapse complexity for the people in it. Complexity blocks choice, it blocks action. So our goal is to make things as easy as possible to make moving easier. That way we can bridge the gap between where people are and where they want to be, where their stories can play out. Take, for example, an unemployed woman who wants to work full-time. The organization’s job is to reduce the complexity that prevents it from getting there, and to give it the freedom to move from point A to point B.

Frischen: And how do you do that?

Echeruo: Let’s take a look at my latest venture, the beloved ecosystem. We will use data science and systems to build startups from scratch in distressed communities that will sell to the US government. These communities make up the bottom 20% of the US population and the US government spends a trillion dollars each year to provide services and payments to the 50 million people who live there. So why can’t those companies that provide these services co-own and employ people who live in the communities they serve?

Frischen: That’s a principle by which most social entrepreneurs work: put closest leaders, those with the lived experience, in charge, rather than outsourcing the fulfillment of perceived needs to outsiders.

Echeruo: Yes. My goal is to co-create wealth in these communities through entrepreneurship and using those principles from physics to build the most efficient startups. And by measuring success by human stories. That’s the benchmark. It’s not the money we spend or the amount of construction we build. We need to measure whether the people who live in those communities, their lives are better now, their stories come true. So our only challenge is understanding what those stories are that people want to come true. That’s our job, that’s empathy. And once you can, you can tap into unlimited energy. Because people have unlimited energy to chase their stories.

Frischen: Your company is called the Beloved Ecosystem. You’re talking about “dear customers.” Why the word “beloved”?

Echeruo: If your lover finds unusual, my previous company was called the Love & Magic Company. But yes, “beloved.” Because if you want to design an organization that connects to the human story, it starts with deep empathy. You really need to understand what people want before you can create some kind of structure to help them achieve that goal. That’s why we talk about beloved customers. Having loved customers increases retention, it increases employee engagement and it increases the clarity of the strategy. It enables you to have alignment between your activities and advance your customer’s story.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. You can read more about Ashoka’s Entrepreneur-to-Entrepreneur Network here.