A new brand, logo, website, and the story of how we arrived here.
Radical World began in a coffee shop in San José, California. Week after week, Matt Perez and I met there to talk about self-management, organizations, and the changes we believed were coming.
We had both experienced corporate life, Matt at Sun Microsystems and me at Sun Media/Quebecor, and could see the possibility of organizing companies differently. We imagined workplaces with greater agency, more widely shared authority, and greater responsiveness to the people within them.
But this would require more than a new management technique. It would require transforming how we understood organizations and the people who made them possible.
We searched for a name that could hold the scale and depth of that change. We arrived at Radical. Radical did not simply mean extreme or disruptive. It came from the idea of the root: the need to look beneath the surface to the assumptions and structures from which our organizations had grown.
That search became the beginning of Radical World.
Beginning with the human question
While Matt concentrated on organizations, I began exploring the human side of the problem. What motivates us? What makes us want what we want and do what we do? What needs are we trying to serve through our choices, relationships, and work?
I called this work Radical Purpose. We piloted a platform to help people understand their deeper motivations and needs, an early attempt to look beneath roles, incentives, and job descriptions to discover what was actually moving people. We ran workshops and worked with several organizations starting the transformation process.
That work preceded Radical Companies, which Matt, Adrian Perez, and I later wrote together. While writing the book, we reached an important conclusion: calling an organization "self-managed" was not enough. No one manages entirely alone. Organizing is relational. It happens through how we make decisions, coordinate responsibilities, respond to tensions, and care for what we share.
We began calling it co-management because the work is about managing together. We also came to see co-ownership as essential: genuine co-management is difficult to sustain when ownership and ultimate authority remain concentrated elsewhere.
Radical Companies brought these ideas together into a practical approach to building organizations without bosses or employees — organizations that could be co-owned, co-managed, and grounded in the needs and purposes of their people. But as the book was being published, another question began to trouble me:
What if transforming companies is not enough?
The fractures around us could not be explained only as failures of management, ownership, or organizational design. Something more fundamental was happening. As part of our research, we interviewed more than forty movement makers working at the edges of organizational, social, and systemic change. Their work took many forms, but together it pointed toward a transformation far larger than any single kind of organization.
The question was no longer simply:
How can we build radical companies?
It was becoming:
How do we organize ourselves differently?
Our inquiry had expanded beyond companies to the deeper ways we organize governance, ownership, relationships, knowledge, and society itself. That was when we began bringing everything together under Radical World.
Losing Matt
Last year, Matt passed away after living for several years with the same cancer that took my father.
It is difficult to separate the evolution of Radical World from the loss of someone with whom so much of it began.
Matt and I spent years questioning assumptions that most organizations treat as fixed. We challenged one another, followed ideas into unexpected places, and kept returning to the possibility that people could create something better together.
He is not here to see this new expression of Radical World. But his questions, his work, and his conviction that we can organize differently remain part of its roots.
Returning to the ground
Over the last year, Radical World has undergone its most significant transformation yet.
We have come to understand that this work cannot begin with a preferred organizational model. It cannot begin with companies, structures, or systems and then ask life to adapt to them.
It has to begin at a deeper level.
Why does work feel so broken?
Why do our lives feel so fractured?
Why do the systems we created to serve us so often require us to serve them instead?
And what might we build if we began with life — not as another resource or category, but as the living process in which we all participate?
This shift has led us to develop the Common Ground Protocol, Open Social Protocols, and Open Social Publications, alongside research intended to contribute to the emergence of the first collaborative ecosystem.
These are not separate initiatives gathered beneath a single brand. They are connected experiments in learning how we might observe, coordinate, organize, and create from common ground.
The goal is no longer simply to build radical companies.
It is to explore a radically different way of organizing—of being, working, and living.
A new expression of Radical World
Today, we are introducing a new Radical World brand, logo, and website.
The new identity reflects the journey that brought us here.
The sun represents emergence—what is becoming visible and what might still be possible.
The roots represent the ground beneath our stories and systems: the relationships, needs, and living processes on which everything we create depends.
The horizon holds them together.
Our new language reflects the same movement:
Rooted in life. Organizing differently.
The website brings together the inquiry behind Radical World and the work now taking shape. It is a place to explore the relationship between life and story, practice creating from common ground, encounter new projects and protocols, and participate in what comes next.
What comes next cannot be prescribed
Radical World is not announcing a finished answer. We are making a commitment to begin from a different ground.
The future cannot be built by repeatedly repairing systems rooted in the assumptions of the past. It will require people willing to create new forms—without waiting for permission, claiming to possess a complete blueprint, or attempting to do it alone.
We imagine a future built through association rather than command and control.
A future in which freedom and responsibility are inseparable.
A future in which people can organize without submitting to someone else's predetermined answer.
A future rooted in life.
With gratitude
This work has never been mine alone. My thanks to Adrian and the Perez family for their enduring friendship; the team at Xipe Technology in Mexico for their support and tools; Max Henning for his continued work and Andy Brogan for his insight and encouragement on Serving Life; and Scott Clearwater for helping develop the Common Ground Protocol and Open Social Protocols.
Special thanks to Ali Reza Ahmadi for his extraordinary help with the logo and website design — and to my co-pilot, Laura Denton, for her patience, love, and immeasurable support throughout it all.
The new Radical World is an invitation to investigate, practice, and build that future together.