CONCEPT
Colleague Letter of Understanding
Morning Star's replacement for the job description — an annually negotiated document between each employee and the colleagues whose work intersects theirs, defining commitments and accountability relationships without hierarchical mediation.
The Colleague Letter of Understanding (CLOU) is Morning Star's structural replacement for the traditional job description. Each employee begins by writing a personal mission statement — what they exist to contribute at Morning Star — and then negotiates CLOUs with each colleague whose work intersects theirs. The documents are specific, binding in the sense that colleagues hold each other accountable to them, and revisable as circumstances change. They are revisited annually and can be adjusted more frequently. A single employee may have dozens of CLOUs, each defining a specific working relationship with a specific colleague.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The CLOU emerged from Chris Rufer's conviction that adults should coordinate their work as adults coordinate the rest of their lives — through explicit agreements rather than through hierarchical assignment. A job description imposed by a manager assumes that the manager knows better than the employee and her colleagues what the employee should do. The CLOU reverses this assumption: the employee and her