Understanding Society
Jos de Blok
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
‘How do you motivate your employees?’ Buurtzorg founder Jos de Blok’s answer is disarming: ‘I don’t. Seems patronizing.’ Doug’s profile, based on Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History, pairs that anti-managerial philosophy with unlikely honors. De Blok was named the Netherlands’ Employer of the Year five times and received the Royal Society of Arts’ Albert Medal, joining recipients including Tim Berners-Lee and Stephen Hawking.
A Note on the Original Text
Doug’s writings are presented as originally written. Spelling, punctuation, and grammatical irregularities have been retained to preserve his words and the integrity of the original record.
ORIGINAL WRITING
The content in this post is based on the book Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman.
Jos de Blok has built a highly successful home health care organization, Buurtzorg, that employs over fourteen thousand people. He’s been voted Employer of the Year in the Netherlands five times. Consider the following interview:
Interviewer: Is there anything you do to motivate yourself? Steve Jobs reportedly asked himself in the mirror each morning: What would I do if this were my last day?
Jos: I read his book too, and I don’t believe a word of it.
Interviewer: Do you ever attend networking sessions?
Jos: At most of those things, nothing happens aside from everybody affirming everybody else’s opinions. That’s not for me.
Interviewer: How do you motivate your employees?
Jos: I don’t. Seems patronizing.
Interviewer: What’s your speck on the horizon, Jos—that distant goal that inspires you and your team?
Jos: I don’t have distant goals. Not all that inspired by specks.
Unlikely as it may sound, this is also a man who’s received the prestigious Albert Medal from the Royal Society of Arts in London, ranking him with the likes of Tim Berners-Lee, the brain behind the World Wide Web; Francis Crick, who unravelled the structure of DNA; and the brilliant physicist Stephen Hawking. In November 2014, it was Jos de Blok from small-town Holland who received the honor and the cream of British academia turned out to attend his keynote speech. In broken English, de Blok confessed that at first it was a joke.
But it was no joke. It was high time.