Latro: A Pioneer in Collective Management and Radical Transparency

Joost Minnaar
Written by Joost Minnaar July 01, 2024

Founded in 2010, Latro has transitioned from a traditional chemical supplier to a global leader in chemical solutions across textiles, cosmetics, aerospace, automotive, and more. By embracing a model that prioritizes radical transparency, autonomy, and collaboration, Latro exemplifies the potential of distributed management and continuous improvement in creating extraordinary outcomes.

This blog post is part of 50+ case studies of self-managing organizations we created for the 2024 inaugural ZeroDX awards. These organizations embody the principles of RenDanHeYi in their work structures:

  • Zero Distance to customer: Decision what to build is based on insights from the marketplace

  • Autonomy: Small teams with full decision-making autonomy enable speed in execution

  • Shared Rewards: Everyone in the micro-enterprise participates in its financial success.

Introducing Latro

Latro, founded in 2010 in Istanbul, Turkey, began as a supplier of textile auxiliary chemicals. Since its inception, the company has grown to provide chemical solutions across a wide range of industries, including textiles, cosmetics, electronics, aerospace, automotive, and agriculture. Now a global player with a presence in over 30 countries, Latro prides itself on being a living ecosystem. The company operates on the belief that autonomy, collaboration, and innovation are key to creating sustainable growth and extraordinary chemical solutions.

The heart of Latro’s organizational success lies in its commitment to its core values: exploration, wholeness, and being a people-centric network. Defined as "explorers", Latro’s employees embody a deep connection to these values, with each team working autonomously to discover new possibilities and solutions. This ecosystemic approach, alongside its RenDanHeYi management style, enables Latro to continuously transform and innovate, leading to its recognition as one of Europe’s best workplaces.

Organizational Structure

Latro operates without traditional hierarchies, managers, or titles. Instead, the company is structured into autonomous teams called "hubs" that function like startups. These hubs are aligned with specific market needs and work closely with partners, including customers and suppliers. The hubs enjoy extensive autonomy, operating under principles of radical transparency and collective management.

The organizational culture at Latro emphasizes collaboration and shared responsibility. Each hub is responsible for its profit and loss, and financial information, including salaries, is transparently available to all employees. This transparency fosters a culture of trust and accountability, where each team member is invested in the company's success.

The transformation at Latro was significantly influenced by its founder, Haluk Can Hür. After stepping down from his role as CEO to eliminate hierarchical barriers, Hür continues to contribute as a mentor, leveraging his experience to guide and support the teams without imposing authority​.

Client Engagement and Innovation

Latro’s approach to customer engagement is deeply aligned with its core value of creating extraordinary solutions. The company’s commitment to continuous experimentation and market disruption has helped them develop exceptional value across multiple sectors.

Latro's hubs are tailored to meet the specific needs of different sectors, ensuring that the solutions provided are highly relevant and effective. This client-centric approach has helped Latro build strong, lasting relationships with its partners and expand its reach to over 30 countries.

Latro has a living ecosystem that is growing and re-shaping itself with customer needs. With a collective management understanding, Latro encourages internal entrepreneurs to develop any potential startups out of the opportunities they see in the market. Ino Cosmetics is a prime example, producing unique cosmetic products for the B2C market, a sector Latro had never entered before. The idea was born out of a real consumer need and demand, and it's now functioning successfully as part of the ecosystem.

By continually evolving to meet customer demands and leveraging a living ecosystem, Latro demonstrates how a company can thrive by balancing internal autonomy with external collaboration.

Internal Culture and Autonomy

One of the standout features of Latro is its internal culture, which prioritizes autonomy, ownership, and continuous personal growth.

The company eschews traditional performance metrics like KPIs, opting instead to track the number of experiments conducted and the learnings derived from them. This shift has led to a more dynamic and innovative work environment where failure is seen as an integral part of the learning process.

Latro's business rhythm can be summarized as follows:

  • Discovery: Each hub runs its own quarterly sessions to explore new hypotheses and define new business experiments to run accordingly.
  • Improve: Review and refine anything (eg. teamwork, way of working, etc.) as needed, as a hub internally, or call for the ecosystem when needed.
  • Progress: Each hub runs a weekly short session to track their own experiments and fine-tune if needed.
  • Share & Inspire: This is where the ecosystem meets quarterly, share their failures and learnings, and inspire others. This is where collective learning is happening and new big ideas are born.
  • Update & Learn: This is an asynchronous way hubs provide important updates to the ecosystem, whenever they think that there is something important to be shared.

Latro's commitment to autonomy and ownership extends to its unique compensation structure. Employees receive salaries based on their experience and tenure, supplemented by a profit-sharing scheme that distributes a portion of the company's profits quarterly. Latro shares a minimum of 10% (and a maximum of 20% with significant growth) of its quarterly net profit with all explorers in the ecosystem. It is anticipated that this percentage will increase as the net income grows. Additionally, explorers decide on their own salaries collectively based on transparent financial data.

This model ensures that all team members are financially invested in the company's success, promoting a collective effort toward achieving organizational goals​.

Latro's innovative and inclusive culture has not gone unnoticed. The company has been recognized as one of Europe's best workplaces by the Great Place to Work organization and Modern Work Award, reflecting its commitment to creating a positive and empowering work environment.

Conclusion

Latro’s innovative approach to autonomy, transparency, and collaboration has allowed it to thrive in the highly competitive chemical industry. By operating as a living ecosystem where teams act as autonomous startups, Latro has proven that progressive organizational models can drive both innovation and growth.

As Latro continues to expand and evolve, its model of distributed management and continuous experimentation offers a powerful example of how businesses can thrive by embracing radical transparency, employee autonomy, and customer-centric solutions.

Written by Joost Minnaar
Joost Minnaar
Co-founder Corporate Rebels. My daily focus is on research, writing, and anything else related to making work more fun.
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