Valco's organizational structure is consciously based on an unconventional organizational model, which we call the Minion Model™. This is not a joke, but a consistently constructed and theoretically radical approach to organizational behavior.

Experts are the problem – and consultants

Our starting point is simple: Most companies' problems begin with having too many experts.

Experts are dangerous because they carry with them "best practices." They believe things should be done "correctly," whereas we believe they should be done first, and then we can think about what was done.

The most dangerous of all are consultants. Especially those who wear ties to work.

They spread bad practices they've learned in corporations and universities and try to apply them the same way to every company.

The ultimate goal of a consultant is to standardize: to make all organizations, processes, and people interchangeable. Because they don't know how to do anything else.

The result: a world full of companies that look, sound, and feel the same—and that's why they're all equally dreary. Except Valco.

Minion: the unit of learning

The Minion Model is the pinnacle of brilliance and is based on consciously constructed inexperience.

Its basic unit is not an expert, but a minion – a person whose primary competence is the ability to try anything, without yet understanding anything about it.

A minion is a blank slate. They have no methods, prejudices, or even a clear idea of what they're doing. That's why they're dangerously effective. They act, fail, and learn – usually in that order.

Without models and the shackles of expertise, minions adapt to the situation like water in a container: as needed, even becoming a religious sect or a paramilitary unit for the corporate wars of the apocalypse.

The philosophy and theoretical foundation of minioning

The Minion Model is based on simple management logic: if everyone only does what they know, nothing new ever happens.

The theoretical core of the Minion Model relies on the concept of professional plasticity – the psychological ability of an individual to stretch into a task for which they have no qualifications whatsoever.

In other words: the less you know, the more you learn, and the more uncertainty, the greater the likelihood of accidentally inventing something no one intended.

That's why we give people tasks they've never done before. A minion doing customer service might suddenly become a sales manager minion, and Hannes from maintenance might end up handling product development in China, in Chinese. This is not chaos. This is learning – poorly managed and random, but learning nonetheless.

If someone succeeds, it's recorded as a process.
If someone fails, it's recorded as a story.
Both are valuable, but only one ends up in the newsletter.

Special expertise is allowed – but useless

Of course, in an international expert organization like Valco, there must be people with special expertise. Someone can code, another is an audio wizard, and the undersigned is an incredible lover.

However, it doesn't change anything. Minioning is not a profession, but an existential state.

Previous expertise is mostly background noise that covers the essential: the ability to react to what happens when no one knows what's happening.

This ensures that no one has time to settle into their comfort zone and that work retains a healthy dose of constant panic-stricken despair.

That despair is the most important fuel for innovation: the moment before collapse is often when something surprisingly functional is born. Or it doesn't work, in which case we learn something new.

Leadership in the Minion Model

The most important task of a leader is to endure that everything is, so to speak, going to hell.

A bit like the dog in KC Green's comic that became a meme in the middle of a fire – except the dog is calm because it understands that this is normal business.

At the core of the Minion Model's leadership philosophy is the idea that Valco doesn't really want to lead or guide.

Minions are led in situations where people are marched to be shot or forced to dig salt from a rock. We don't usually do either, so this company isn't really led in the traditional sense.

Guidance is needed when there are people around who don't understand what they're doing or need to do something counterintuitively stupid. A bit like in government administration. However, we don't hire stupid people.

At Valco, it's assumed that people can strive towards a common goal on their own, even if no one is sure what it exactly is.

The leader's role is not to command but to exist. As a physical and mental entity that answers questions and acts as a source of boundless knowledge, wisdom, and absolute clarity. It's easy to run a company successfully when you just radiate the light of reason around you.

Those who can't do that should go work for the municipality.

If the leader happens to be unavailable, for example, on a drinking trip in South America, the model doesn't stop. Minions then rely on peer learning and the silent spread of knowledge, meaning that someone remembers hearing something that might be related to the matter.

This way, knowledge circulates organically, and decisions are made in a collective haze, which has proven to be surprisingly effective.

Final words

The Minion Model isn't for everyone, but it works for us because it forces us to think and act simultaneously. It prevents us from being too sure of anything and ensures that bureaucracy or rigid practices don't accidentally form.

Honestly, it also works because we don't know or bother to do anything else. Valco was founded from the start primarily as a joke – and in the process, accidentally as a company that conquers the world. Chaos is strategy, error is learning, and laughter is the only management system we have in place.

And when someone inevitably asks: “If you're so great, why aren't you a bigger company?”

The answer is simple: buy more headphones.