How We Treat Our People Is the Practice Run: Our Belief in the Corporate Rebels Philosophy

Corporate Rebels is a global movement built on a simple finding: better organizations are not just possible, they already exist. Its peer network, the Rebel Cells, brings those organizations together to share what actually works, and what does not. What sets it apart is its honesty. At their gatherings there are no glossy success stories and, by explicit rule, no PowerPoint. Just people describing what they are trying and where it gets hard. Their work is taught at INSEAD and Harvard Business School and reaches over five million people a month. (It started, for the record, with two Dutchmen, Joost Minnaar and Pim de Morree, who left their corporate jobs to go and find these organizations for themselves.)

We have now joined a second cell, in Switzerland, alongside our long-standing place in Belgium. The reason is simple and human: Renay Hanson, our People, Culture and Organization Lead, and Sandra Kreuer, our Chief People & Transformation Officer and GM Switzerland, are both based there, and personal connection is what turns an interesting evening into a lasting one. Being closer to the network means more first-hand access and support, so we can build on what we have already started rather than begin something new. 

We aspire to this way of working because we believe in it. The network is where our belief gets sharpened, by people who are further along and generous with what they have learned. For us, the philosophy comes down to a few beliefs: 

• People, nature, and the economy should work together, not against each other. 
• The people closest to a problem are usually best placed to solve it. 
• Curiosity is worth protecting. 

This work is guided by our People, Culture, and Transformation (PCT) team, but it does not belong to them alone. These beliefs are part of Innovad Group's DNA, and everyone here helps carry them. Like sherpas on a shared climb, each person pulls their weight, and it is that steady, collective effort that moves the culture upward. Cultivating a culture like this is never finished. It is ongoing work, and the people who do it are the leaders of the pack, the ones who keep building on this belief, day after day. 

Philosophy is easy to write and hard to live. For us it is a test, not a programme: every framework, policy, and process gets checked against the eight shifts that Corporate Rebels describe, such as control to trust, secrecy to transparency, and centralised to distributed decisions. One question guides all of it: does this give people more clarity, trust, and ownership? 

That test produces real change, from a more consistent hiring process to removing working-hours tracking in selected locations and piloting self-managed teams. Underneath sit a few deeper ideas. 

We work like an Octopus. One central brain sets purpose and strategy; autonomous arms sense, decide, and act close to reality. It is the shift from hierarchy to networks. Size is not our problem; slowness would be. The Octopus lets us grow without getting slower: autonomy without chaos, alignment without bureaucracy. 

We build in fairness and transparency. Fairness is not a value on the wall; it is built into how we decide, looking at role and level before the individual, so that someone's experience does not depend on their manager or their country. And we practise transparency even when it is hard. When last year's employee survey returned our lowest score, at 43%, on whether we act when someone is not delivering in their role, we did not bury it. We published it, made it a focus area, let people vote on the fixes, and committed to them publicly. We are asking again in September. 

It moves from the ground up. When our ambassadors spent two days together in Bologna last December, the ideas they shaped there became our 2026 people strategy, presented at the Town Hall just eight weeks later. Most of it never looks like transformation. It looks like swapping sandwiches for soup so people sit down together, or a manager asking a question instead of giving an answer. 

The momentum is mostly internal, and deliberately so: more ownership close to the work, and a culture that keeps testing itself.  

But the ambition reaches past our own walls. If someone who worked here moves on, they carry what they learned with them, into other companies, other teams, our industry, our partners and distributors. A better way of working does not stay put, and that is rather the point: this is bigger than us. We share the Corporate Rebels book with every new colleague, because this is not something we read about once. It is how we are choosing to organize, in the belief that how we treat each other here is where a healthier relationship between people, nature, and the economy begins.