Reimagine Mainetti – the journey begins
“We need a new organization model that is more efficient and responsive.”
I nodded along as I listened to Pham Huy Phong, General Director of Mainetti Vietnam (MVN), spoke. That day was the kick-off meeting of the Reimagine Mainetti project, which aimed to transform MVN’s management model. I was excited because this was not only the project closest to the mission of Dom Dom Lab so far, but it was also the first experiment in Vietnam when a factory implemented a self-organization model.
Mainetti is a multinational corporation with its main products being hangers and packaging. Recently, the growth of its core business has slowed down, and MVN pioneered the label printing industry in Vietnam. However, facing the complex challenges of the new market, Phong said that the traditional management model “is responding slowly and ineffectively.” So he and some colleagues launched a campaign to transform the organizational model based on the concept they had recently learned: Teal organization.
The first time I heard about the Teal organization was nearly 10 years ago, when I read the book Reinventing Organizations. In that book, author Frederick Laloux drew a connection between the development of human consciousness and the way they organize together. Laloux represented each stage of evolution with a color. In the most advanced stage to date, Teal, people practice self-management, celebrate each other’s wholeness, and act together for a common purpose.
I was very interested when reading about the organizations practicing Teal that Laloux mentioned in the book; the way they work is so free and creative. I was also wistful because I didn’t know if the model could work in Vietnam. To this day, I can count the number of Teal organizations I know in Vietnam, including Dom Dom Lab, on one hand and still have fingers left. So the project in Mainetti, with the potential to spread to branches in other countries, is a unique opportunity.
Besides Dom Dom Lab, accompanying MVN in this project is Peoplerise—a consulting company that is helping Mainetti Global implement Teal. Last December, we spent a whole week with MVN to roll out phase one. On the first day, we introduced the Teal concept to the MVN team, and for the remaining four days, we helped them see clearly their current system. With bags of all kinds of toys, we invited MVN to build a 3D model showing their organization as it was right now. The tangled wires helped visualize the bottlenecks and inefficiencies in the organization, and different departments could also understand each other’s struggle.
A man in the production department exclaimed why they were spending so much effort to create a perfect product, then had to sell it at a loss. That hurt his self-esteem. A sales lady responded that his sharing really touched her. She thought that only the boss cared about profit or loss, she did not expect that it also affected the workers. That empathy made everyone in the circle come closer together, and they started to build a future model, where they had a “dream” organization.
From these two models, ideas began to emerge about the future of Mainetti. In the next phase of the project, we will focus on improving the self-management capacity of their team, and at the same time facilitate strategic discussions so that MVN can co-create its own new organization model.
“The customer is the embodiment of the purpose of an organization,” I remember well that quote from Peoplerise’s Alessandro Rossi. Dom Dom Lab shares self-management practices not only because they are effective, we want to see more creative and humane workplaces. So for us, Mainetti Vietnam is more than just a client project, these are clear steps towards the future we want to build.