Management as a Liberal Art Research Institute

An Interview with Yellow Couch, Filip Hrkal, Chief Vision Officer-CEE Region

Carol Mendenall, Ph.D.

PUBLISHED:

November 30, 2022

Dr. Mendenall chose to interview Yellow Couch due to their business traits: innovation, a change-balance model, ethical leadership, and consistency in product. Yellow Couch is an online Human Resources business that provides clients with employee recruitment and development services in Central East Europe. Filip Hrkal and Vaclav Coubal started the company in 2006.

 

1.    What was your most recent set of innovations to become the online self-sufficient company that you are now?

 

Product Innovation

Add the best technology and the best assessments to increase awareness and explanation of human potential. This is for businesses and potential as well as current employees. “Everyone was asking how can you test on mobile phone. Stay with what you do.” The answer was “We see this trend coming.” Now, Yellow Couch is focused on virtual and augmented reality. 60% of the assessments now run in Eastern and Central Europe are on smartphone over the computer. Therefore, Mr. Hrkal sees that these tests will soon be done in alternate realities.

Business Innovations

Yellow Couch became a “pure online company over a 3-year period.” State-of-the-art technology was essential with stable Internet connection. They had to avoid cloud collection to protect data so Yellow Couch as has their own secure servers. This also allows employees to access the necessary materials to work from a distance.

Yellow Couch developed the method for recruitment of employees because different characteristics were needed such as flexibility and ability to work independently.



2.    How do you keep the team dynamic so everyone is traveling toward the same goal?

 

Keeping Talented Employees

There is a clear set up of responsibilities. Leadership promotes meeting in-person once every 14 days for social time, when possible, so that online meetings can focus on projects, new ideas, and issues. Yellow Couch can be very flexible because of their size and being quick decision-makers. For example, an informal idea forming document was shared in the common online space to promote suggestions and discussion prior to the quarterly goal-setting meeting. This provides brainstorming time that gives autonomy to employees to share their thoughts. With this think time, the meeting can begin part way through the discussion, be focused, and within a shorter time limit because the discussion had already been started.

Flex Schedules

Yellow Couch uses flex scheduling with part-time employees of specialized talents. The employee is paid to be available instead of at an hourly or daily rate. This allows colleagues to work on their own business endeavors, but also work for Yellow Couch when needed. Flex scheduling also works for those on parental leave. Full-time employees have standard scheduling for certain functions and meetings, but also have some flexibility to complete other responsibilities.

 

3.    What are some obstacles that are no longer in the way now that you are an on-line company?

The obstacle was the office. The time that it took to commute to the office for each employee is now spent on personal life. This allows for a focus on personal health and wellbeing. The need for an office was a psychological obstacle. It was made easier to adjust to online only with COVID though we had started the process before. Customers want online assessment instead of assessment being done in an office because more work is being done online.

 

Mr. Hrkal’s closing thoughts:

Balance in Function

In the past 3-4 years, Yellow Couch has streamlined what was offered to clients based on time and investment analysis. They narrowed their portfolio to reduce the energy spent on items that were not viable from an economic point of view. This allows for focused energy in other areas.

The company also has zero debts to allow for financial freedom to choose projects, clients, and without the added pressure of financial need. The clients seem satisfied because the employees are not in a rush. There is a balance. This also allows a focus on “health and well-being for us, our employees, and our clients and their employees to promote good work-life balance and mental status” Mr. Hrkal stresses that this is an essential focus of business leaders for the next few years.

 

Yellow Couch can be found at https://www.yellowcouch.cz/en/ as well as LinkedIn.

The full interview can be found on our MLARI channel at Yellow Couch Interview with MLARI, Part 1

A Tribute to Charles Handy (1932-2024)

By Karen Linkletter Ph.D. • January 6, 2025
On December 13, 2024, we lost a seminal management philosopher and theorist: Charles Handy. Like Peter Drucker, Handy was a social thinker and management theorist who emphasized the human side of work as more important than profits and valued individual growth and development in organizations. Handy was born in Ireland and studied at Oxford. In 1956, he went to work for Shell, working in Borneo, where he met his future wife, Elizabeth Hill. Disillusioned by corporate life, Handy left Shell in 1962 to study management at MIT in their executive program. Inspired by their humanistic approach, he returned to London in 1967 to start the London Business School. Handy knew Drucker and was a regular keynote speaker at the Global Drucker Forum in Vienna. The two men had much in common in terms of their approaches to management and social theory. Like Drucker, Handy became an author (although, unlike Drucker, Handy was a corporate executive before he turned to writing). Handy wrote not just on business but also society, serving as much as a social ecologist as Drucker was. In his pivotal book, The Age of Unreason (1989), Handy argued for the disruption of discontinuity – resulting in a new world of business, education, and work that was highly unpredictable. He rejected shareholder capitalism and saw the organization as a place for human purpose and fulfillment, based on trust. Like Drucker, Handy advocated federalism in organizations, disseminating authority and responsibility to the lowest possible levels. He also saw “the future that had already happened.” Handy coined the term “portfolio life,” where knowledge workers would increasingly work remotely and for multiple organizations. In the 1980s, he posited that society consisted of “shamrock organizations”: those that had three integrated leaves: full-time employees, outside contractors, and temporary workers. Handy thus foresaw the new “gig economy” and increasingly autonomy of knowledge work. Finally, like Drucker, Handy had a life partner who not only supported his career but was an independent woman with her own interests. Liz Handy, like Doris Drucker, was an entrepreneur who ran an interior design business, and later was a professional photographer and Charles’s business agent.  Minglo Shao, founder of CIAM, remembers Handy as a warm man who made several important contributions to what we see as the fundamentals of Management as a Liberal Art. We are thankful for Handy’s contributions to management theory and social thought, and for his legacy at the Global Drucker Forum in the form of the Charles and Elizabeth Handy Lecture Series.

Treasures from the Charles Handy Drucker Forum legacy

By Richard and Ilse Straub with the Drucker Forum Team • December 29, 2024
For 15 years, Charles Handy did us the enormous honor of choosing the Drucker Forum as a privileged platform for delivering his message to the world, and particularly to the younger generation in which he had such faith. Following up on our initial announcement of Charles’ passing Charles Handy (1932–2024) , we are honored to share a selection of his key contributions to the Forum with our wider community. Charles’ brilliant keynotes at the Drucker Forum have become legendary. Normally accessible only to members of the Drucker Society, from today they are available as recordings to the wider public for a period of 30 days. At the first centennial Forum in 2009, Charles talked about his debt to Peter Drucker while outlining his own fundamental management concepts that he had developed over the years. Two years later, he touched on the ideas of Adam Smith and demonstrated how much more to them there was than the celebrated “invisible hand” of self-interest. In his landmark closing address in 2017, pursuing a thread developed in his 2015 book The Second Curve, he called for a management reformation that would turn it into a tool for the common good – thus drawing the first contours of what we would announce six years later as the Next Management . We took to heart his exhortation not to wait for great leaders but “to start small fires in the darkness, until they spread and the whole world is alight with a better vision of what we could do with our businesses”. Management’s "second curve" will be the focus of the “Charles and Elizabeth Handy Lecture Series” in 2025. Following the loss of his beloved wife Elizabeth in 2018 and a severe stroke, Charles was much reduced in mobility in his last years – but not in his determination to continue spreading his message of hope to the world. He couldn’t participate in person in the Drucker Forum 2022, but he participated in a moving online interview with his son Scott, who directed young actors in a short performance of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot by Beckett to illustrate some points.  Charles also contributed valued digital articles for our blog and for Drucker Forum partners. Even during the most difficult period of his life he continued to write and develop his ideas in weekly columns for the Idler magazine. This entailed first memorizing the article, then dictating it and finally reviewing it by having someone it re-read to him – a remarkable feat of memory and determination. The article is a jewel and most appropriate for Christmas and the season of self-reflection. Have a wonderful Christmas, happy holidays and a healthy and prosperous New Year.

The Future of Knowledge Work: What Drucker can teach us

By Karen Linkletter Ph.D. • November 19, 2024
Interview with Karen Linkletter at the 16th Global Peter Drucker Forum 2024  Video Interview
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