Since my initial post “Corporate Rebels United – the start of a corporate spring?” of 17 March 2012, a lot of exciting things happened.

I’d like to share with you where we are, and what’s the plan for the upcoming weeks and months. When most of you will be on the beaches, we’ll do some digging and set the basis for some of our infrastructure needs 😉

What happened?

The 17 March post was without any doubt the most viewed post ever on my personal blog. I got loads of comments. I got in contact with some very high profile people who offered their mentorship, coaching and mindshare in their communities. Many very cool people contacted me and wanted to know how they could be part of the movement. Clearly, something strong and positive resonated with you.

We now have a “core” group of +/- 30 Corporate Rebels: it’s a cross-industry group, with folks from the Americas, EMEA, and APAC. All the way from San Francisco to Sydney, with Europe in-between. Maybe still a bit weak in South-America, Africa, and Asia. We’re getting there 😉

We had several calls and Skypes, and we had our first face-to-face meeting in London on 22 June 2012. We had about 10 core rebels attending physically and 15-20 via call: one call for the Americas and one for APAC. It was a great experience, refreshing, and reinvigorating. With thanks to SWIFT for the meeting facilities.

We have worked hard with that “core” group to articulate why and how we want to create this movement. We also looked in detail into the “what”, the deliverables. We wanted to ensure that the message we sent out was “right” before we throw into the open.

I now want to share with all of you the progress we have made so far. With deep gratitude to the core group of Corporate Rebels United: as all this is obviously the result of teamwork. I also would like to talk everybody who took the time and effort to listen to me and give feedback.

Our mission, vision, and strategy

“To transform our companies into hyper-organizations and create new value for the people they serve.”

“We love our companies and want them to succeed in this high-velocity, hyper-connected world. We want to reboot our corporate and organizational culture to install a 21st century, digitally native version. We want to accelerate positive viral change from deep within the fabric of our organizations. We want to enable and empower the rest of our organizations to move at rapid pace, but room for patience and reflection. We want to unleash the enormous potential that lies within every human being within our organizations. We want to re-ignite the passion in our organizations. We are actionable.”

“We are building a global network of change catalysts that act from their true selves. Our actions will lead to new product and services and new global practices for value creation, agility and velocity. Our community acts from deep personal awareness and presence, and an irresistible enthusiasm opening up old rusty structured. We are architects and scouts into the future, and we want to guide our organizations in navigating a safe path from now to then.”

“We are making and holding a space where everybody can have a voice in service of value creation. “

Our game plan

We are making and holding a space where everybody can have a voice in service of value creation.

• This space is called “Life”. This is where the new practices for value creation exist.
• A community of cells upholds the space. These communities are self-organizing. These cells are built on the DNA of our movement.
• The DNA of our movement is the platform of core principles that are the basis for us to connect, to practice, to embrace, and to inspire other to dream and make their dreams come true

DNA: A core (the common practice, the “commons” practices that cannot change, everything else can change. The DNA gives birth to cells. The cells can organize themselves.

They decide upon their own activities, their own resources, and their own relationships. And they always connect back to the mothership, the DNA of common core principles. Together, the cells create “Life” – our new global practice for value creation.

Our deliverables

We plan 8 types of deliverables:

• Our manifesto
• A common language
• The 20 core principles of our DNA
• A New Global Practice for Value Creation
• A Belonging and Support program
• A Discovery program
• An Exchange program
• A series of Events

I would like to summarize some of these deliverables:

The Manifesto

It has not changed really, but I’ll share it once more, as it, especially the “relentless” part of it, inspired so many people 😉

Relentlessly

Challenging the status quo

Breaking the rules

Saying the unsaid

Spreading the innovation virus

Seeding Tribal energy

With No fear

With a cause to do good

Leading by Being from our True Selves

Going after the un-named quality

Relentlessly

Common language, lexicon

It is our ambition to get buy-in and support from our corporate leaders for our proposed company transformations. We also want to articulate the direction. In a language clearly indicating the road from where we are today towards the destination we aim for. More specifically, we want to show the safe path and help our companies navigate from here to there.

This above is just a summary of some from-to destinations. The core group worked out a quite detailed and compelling list.

The 20 Core Principles of our DNA

We don’t want to be an exclusive club or so. It’s just in these early days we keep the group to 30 to be able to hack-out a first solid foundation. We will then throw it fully into the open.

But something needs to hold us together. These are the DNA principles of our practice. In the language section above you’ve seen that one of the to-from destinations is the journey from “Distrust as a default” to “Trust as a default”. Networks only work when there is trust. We want to walk the talk. When we will open-up our movement, everybody how signs-up is “in” by default. You will be “trusted” by default as long as you act in line with our 20 core principles:

• Principle-1: We love our companies and want them to succeed in this high-velocity, hyper-connected world
• Principle-2: We dare to be great
• Principle-3: We have the mandate to be brave and to challenge the status quo
• Principle-4: We reboot our corporate and organizational culture to install a 21st century, digitally native version.
• Principle-5: We accelerate positive viral change from deep within the fabric of our organizations.
• Principle-6: We enable and empower the rest of our organizations to move at rapid pace, but with room for patience and reflection.
• Principle-7: We unleash the enormous potential that lies within every human being within our organizations.
• Principle-8: We re-ignite the passion in our organizations.
• Principle-9: We are actionable
• Principle-10: We are building a global network of change catalysts that act from their true selves.
• Principle-11: Our actions lead to new product and services and new global practices for value creation, agility and velocity.
• Principle-12: Our community acts from deep personal awareness and presence, and an irresistible enthusiasm opening up old rusty structured.
• Principle-13: We are architects and scouts into the future,
• Principle-14: and we want to guide our organizations in navigating a safe path from now to then
• Principle-15: We are very well intended individuals
• Principle-16: We are united people with shared purpose starting with your own being
• Principle-17: We maintain integrity and relevance of the reason.
• Principle-18: We keep our community a safe environment, where you can become who you want to become. Where you are not alone in being a catalyst
• Principle-19: Our core values are integrity, clarity of reason, brightness and great positive energy
• Principle-20: Reflection, reporting back and adding-on to each others input and opinions is our natural way of collecting and discussing opinions.

New Global Practices for Value Creation

The core of our ambition is to create/let emerge a new Global Practice for Value Creation.

It’s “practice” like in Lean “practice” and SixSigma “practice”. However these are  for increasing efficiency in our organizations. We are on the innovation side. Innovation is less about “optimizing” the core engine; it’s more about new value creation.

Imagine having “black-belts”, “champions” in value creation and deep transformation of our companies based on our mission and principles. In the end, a company should be proud and outspoken of having x number of “black-belt Rebels” on board!

We want it to be global. From a meta-story perspective, wanting it to be something “global” that holds the values is probably one of the strongest thoughts of our movement.

We would like that these practices develop in a self-emerging way through the activities of the cells. Our expectation is that these practices are grounded in following principles:

• Practice of Courage, Fear-is-not-an-Option, No fear to jump
• Behavior/attitude: “Shift Makers”, “Accelerating Purposeful Innovation”, “Inside and Outside the company”, “Accelerators”, “Catalysts”, “Igniters”, carrying “The soul of Innovation”, “Re-Build”, “Re-Work, “Corporate Activists”, “Positive Deviants”
• Emergent from the cells
• Includes stealth approaches etc
• Practices that lead to mastery
• Focus on what works
• Be part of curriculum
• Certification levels vs. Reputation system
• To be added as program to universities etc

In writing this blog post, it suddenly becomes clear to me that we found the sweet spot between “singing my own song”,  my loosely defined concept of a “New Value Movement”, and the irresistible enthusiasm of corporate rebels who want their companies to succeed in the 21^st century by creating viral change from within.

What’s next?

I just sent a much more detailed consolidation of the 22 June London meeting to the core team. Given the summer holiday period we gave ourselves time till Mid August to co-edit all that material.

By somewhere mid-September our web site should be done.

We have planned our next face to face on 22 Sep 2012 in Providence, Rhode Island (USA), back to back with the BIF8 Summit.

Many BIF Summit participants come as teams from the same organization or affiliated group – using the BIF magic to challenge norms, inspire creativity, and think across disciplines. Recognizing how hard it is to bottle the magic, and harder still to operationalize it upon the return to business as usual, BIF offered us an interesting Team Package, helping us prepare for and act on insights and random collisions experienced at the Summit. Thank you BIF for your generosity.

The BIF8 conference is on 19-20 Sep 2012 http://www.businessinnovationfactory.com/bif-8

• This is a great conference – very good storytellers and good vibe for our rebels group
• There is also an exclusive BIF8 Workshop on 21 Sep 2012 with Alex Osterwalder (Business Model Canvas) http://www.businessinnovationfactory.com/events/business-model-innovation

It’s probably around that time we will throw it into the open.

And in November, we’ll do some solid campaigning in the heavy event season with Innotribe at Sibos, Techonomy, Defrag and Blur. And back-to-back to that week, we plan our 3^rd face to face on 17 Nov 2012 in Boulder, Colorado (USA).

For 2013, we already received a generous offer from the Australian AMPlify Festival to host one of our next coming together.

Hopefully by then, we’ll find some sponsors to cover some of the basic costs for keeping this going.

Some resources:

• Prezi: some of the visuals is this post were created in Prezi. I did a talk at the EU Marie-Curie event in Brussels on 3 July that included our rebels story. That talk has 3 sections:
  • Part-1: a metaphor for the process of innovation called “how to make babies”
  • Part-2: a pirate/rebels metaphor for “the soul of innovation”
  • Part-3: a section about out movement
  • You can find the Prezi here (Put sound “on”, as i play with some embedded video/audio): http://prezi.com/6g62xhxxgda0/marie-curie-soul-and-rebels-of-innovation-set-audio-on/
  • The talk was also recorded here: http://t.co/vbe9lqlp
• I am still maintaining a Scoop.it curation on Corporate Rebels United. As I am doing my daily RSS Feed reading, tweeting, etc, I am reading them with a specific “Corporate Rebels”-lens and put them all together in one place: http://www.scoop.it/t/corporate-rebels-united > check it out

Feel free to use and share it with anybody who can help and support our cause. Let’s rock this place together and let’s get a life / get alive ! And feel free to post events on this blog or contact me via mail or twitter.