I really did have these ideas before I read about Teal Organizations. I promise.

What if a company saw a thriving community with a strong school system as a critical part of its success? What if a company saw stewardship of our planet as a logical necessity instead of a regulated requirement?

With that mindset, I created the company in the book. One of the most common responses I receive is, “I want to work there!” The next most common response is that it’s a utopian dream and could never happen in the real world.

For a long time, I believed the people were right that it was unobtainable. Then I started seeing things that put cracks in the ‘it’s a utopian dream’ chant. I heard about Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream having a pay structured where the highest paid employee in the company could only make 5x what the lowest paid employee. If you’re the highest paid person in the company and want to make more, take care of the people at the bottom. B&J’s also created the Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream because they met Bernie Glassman, the founder of Greyston Bakery in Yonkers, NY at a conference. Greyston Bakery had an open hiring policy and their motto is “We don’t hire people to bake brownies. We bake brownies to hire people.” They hired felons and others who needed jobs. B&J’s loved Greyston Bakery’s mission and wanted to support them. I was flabbergasted to see real world examples of HRI principles, and then found other companies that were living examples of what I’d written. There was Zappos, a shoe company, where the culture and company was built around ‘delivering happiness.’ Then there was Dan Price who made the minimum wage at his company, Gravity Payments, $70,000 after reading research suggested that’s where income stops easing daily emotional stress. He even cut his own salary from $1.1M to $70,000 to help fund the raises. And there are many more companies who were real world examples of some of HRI’s utopian ways. Maybe not all of them but it showed me what I wrote was not a fantasy.

Then I happened to read Abraham Maslow’s Maslow on Management. That was mind numbing to me because it read like a nonfiction version of Discover. The HRI principles were alive and thriving in Maslow on Management. My ideas were not a pie-in-the-sky wish list. I had come to the same conclusion as the guy who was famous for Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

That should have been plenty for me to hold my chin up high and dismiss the ‘utopian dream‘ criticism. And it was. Reading that book is what gave me permission to finish the final book of the series. Maslow was the missing piece for me and Part 4: Connect fell into place perfectly. But that wasn’t the final piece. I had the owner of a publisher reach out to me after he read the first three parts because part 4 wasn’t out. He loved the concept and the books enough that he just wanted to talk to me. We had an amazing and very casual conversation where he told me TIJ did what few books were able to do. They had depth without preaching. Then, after part 4 was out, he reached out again and told me I did it, that I had closed the series perfectly. But then he asked me if I had ever heard about Teal Organizations. I had not, so I started reading about them and that is why I am reading this book.

So far, Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux is another nonfiction version of HRI in TIJ. It draws heavily from Spiral Dynamics which I was already familiar with and mention in TIJ.

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About the drive behind this blog

I write this as part of The Infinite Jeff series, envisioning Havens Research Institute (HRI) as a “what if corporate America wasn’t a broken machine” scenario. What if a company recognized its responsibility to community and the planet, leveraging its resources to uplift and strengthen the places it touches? That is the core of my vision—imagining a workplace where ambition serves the common good, and readers occasionally tell me, “I want to work there.” The challenge, of course, is translating utopian ideals into realities of today.