Mildberry Cloud: Decentralized

As a founder, I’m passionate about brands, but now I’m even more intrigued, and perhaps concerned, by another topic: organizational models. This is the main thing that is changing in modern business. It will either allow us to stay in business or destroy us, like millions of other companies.

Today, the most important thing is not what we know—knowledge has lost its value. And, oddly enough, not even what we do. What matters is how we are organized. This defines our adaptability and, therefore, our resilience to changes driven by the technological boom that is continuously transforming not only traditional organizational models but also the new ones that are emerging.

The First Experiments

We began our first experiments with organizational structure in 2014–2015. Mildberry had just entered the Chinese market, the number of tasks was growing rapidly, and there was a need to acquire new expertise—primarily digital.

I started solving this challenge in the most straightforward way: creating a new department, hiring people, and integrating them into the team. Very quickly, it became clear that this wasn’t working. I didn’t understand digital services well, it was difficult for me to find the right people, and besides, they didn’t particularly want to work in a company focused on branding rather than digital.

Nevertheless, I built what I believed to be a great team, and everything should have worked. But another problem emerged: the culture, work style, pace, and operating modes of branding agencies and digital specialists were so different that it was impossible to unite and synchronize the teams.

Internal conflicts began. Departments were interfering with each other, competing for resources, offices, people, infrastructure, projects, and development strategy.

Mildberry Digital

As a result, we decided to spin off the division into a separate business and give it the opportunity to grow independently. That’s how Mildberry Digital appeared.

And then everything took off. The growth rates were very high, which was encouraging. Mildberry Digital grew noticeably faster than the parent company, and at some point, the Mildberry team stopped understanding what Mildberry Digital was actually doing.

New partners appeared in Mildberry Digital—including an investment fund and an IT company. This helped a lot, but also complicated things: their ambitions were higher than mine, and their development strategy aligned more with a digital company than a branding one.

For example, we had a new office with coders, which I opened via Zoom and never visited. My IT partners insisted on investing in digital development and opening an office in New York. As a result, a new problem arose: the companies started moving in different directions, and my expertise, experience, and time were not enough to keep everything within a unified group.

I exited the digital business, but the experiments didn’t end.

Autonomies and Holacracy

I actively studied various organizational practices and drew inspiration from examples in other markets. I was fascinated by the idea of holacracy and small autonomies with a high degree of independence, but within a shared infrastructure and under a common brand.

As always, I enthusiastically began to implement the idea.

I invited small groups of freelancers who had experience working independently but were willing to give up some control for new opportunities. Autonomies began to appear quickly.

I generally solve problems quickly—sometimes too quickly, ahead of the natural pace of events.

We had to constantly balance and find the boundaries of autonomy, which wasn’t always successful. Overall, the model worked, but we couldn’t synchronize the autonomies in terms of corporate culture—each team had its own, and that caused friction.

Eventually, we abandoned the idea of bringing in ready-made teams and began experimenting with forming and developing autonomies from within.

We didn’t have time to complete the experiment—COVID arrived and disrupted the plans.

Remote Work and Hybrid Models

COVID ruined many things, but it taught us to work remotely. The office competition, typical for branding and any agency, ended: no one wanted to come to the office anymore, and many employees preferred to work from places that were comfortable for them.

Great, we thought, and began cutting costs for beautiful and expensive spaces, modernizing the way we work.

But even here, there were no ready-made solutions. New models, like traditional ones, have their advantages and disadvantages.A hybrid model must surely exist—and this is exactly what we are actively working on now.

I continue to believe in holacracy, flat organizational structures, and autonomies.

I’d be happy to talk to anyone who is passionate about similar challenges or has experience solving them—preferably successful experience. Just drop me a line on LinkedIn.