Colorkrew Blog

Hello! I’m Yusuke, the HR guy with the dreadlocks. On December 1, 2021, we launch “Culture Deck.”

➡https://www.colorkrew.com/about/culture_deck/

In this blog, I’d want to explain why I came up with the concept of producing a Culture Deck in the first place.

■What exactly is a Culture Deck?

A Culture Deck is a document that describes and summarizes a company’s corporate philosophy, management concepts, and anticipated employee conduct in a thorough manner. More and more firms are developing similar products, although Netflix is perhaps the most well-known. Netflix’s Culture Deck has been called “the most important document ever to come out of the Valley”.

On December 1, 2021, We updated our vision.

「 Color Your Work with Excitement 」

We wish to make working people’s daily life more exciting. We wish to provide color and variety to people’s lives. Our new vision was created with this in mind.

The Vision Project Again

This is the third renewal of our vision since I came to work at Colorkrew in 2010.

Applying to Colorkrew from abroad

About 2 years ago I started thinking about what I wanted to do after graduating. I had been living and studying in Groningen, which has a population of about 200.000 people, and I decided that my next city would be Tokyo. I had visited Japan a couple of times as a student to join a conference or do some sightseeing, but I had never lived there. In fact, I had never lived outside of the Netherlands before.

Dear readers of “The Road to Super Flat Organization.” Thank you so much for reading!

Back number:The Road to Super Flat Organization #9: The Road to Non-territorial Office

I found out that my friends did not press the “like” button, especially those who often tell me, “I read your blog!”

So far, I mostly talked about HR and organization. So this time, I will write about the changes in the office.

Back number: The Road to Super Flat Organization #8: 360 Degree Open Evaluation

From two floors office to a single floor

Before we moved to our current office in Asakusabashi, ISAO (Colorkrew, at that time) office was in Yotsuya.

This time, I will talk about how we set our new evaluation system after the new coaching system.

Back number: The Road to Super Flat Organization #7: the Birth of the Coaching System

A problem in a general evaluation method

Evaluation is a supervisor’s job.

Many companies adopt this evaluation system.

This time, I will describe how we worked on the coaching system.

The roles of a manager in the previous organization

Last time, I wrote that we adopted an organization where managers are not there and replaced them with the project leaders as we decided in the management camp.

Back number: The Road to Super Flat Organization #6: The Final Touch, Goodbye Departments! 

To summarize the previous stories, ISAO(Currently, Colorkrew) started disclosing the information in 2012, and at the same time, gradually made the organization flat by reducing unnecessary report lines.  

The last article was about the moment when we were like, “Let’s get rid of all the positions and make the structure flat!”  

This series is going to continue for a little more. However, today I’ll talk about the exact moment of the dawn of Super Flat Organization.

Unexpected Super Flat

In the last article, “The Road to Super Flat Organization #4 : First Open or First Flat?,” I explained how we came to have the three layers: the top, department managers, and everyone. Honestly, I, at that time, was thinking, “This is the best flat organization structure.”

“With what should we start?”

It is a FAQ from managers and leaders who want to install an “Open and Flat” ideology in their organizations.

First, Open

The conclusion is this: the importance of an “Open” culture is ten times more important than a flat organization, and it should be the first step to start.

Last time, I wrote about making things ready to explain why before actually making changes.

The completion of Super Flat Organization needed drastic changes on the previous organization. This time, I’ll talk about how I made decisions and how I moved things forward.

Why change?

A company is a living thing.

In the last article, I explained that “making the company open” was crucial for Super Flat Organization.

Back number: The Road to Super Flat Organization #1: Not a Goal, but a Result

This time, I’ll talk about what to do before making an impactful reform and what we did in ISAO (Colorkrew at that time).

The dark sides of hierarchical, closed organizations

In 2010, I joined ISAO (Colorkrew at that time).

ISAO at that time was a typical hierarchical, closed company.

Although the company culture was a casual one as now it is, teams were hierarchical and inflexible with a tremendous information gap, and it seemed a closed company to me.

In the past, I wrote about the organizations free themselves from management and running spontaneously, in many ways.

In this article, I’ll explain “why management sucks and why autonomy is lovely,” as a summary.

The times have changed

An important premise in talking about the paradigm shift from management to autonomy is that today’s society is quite different from the 20’s century, where Japan had a brilliant development with industrialization.