Hi, I'm Joris Janssen.
I've spent fifteen years trying to answer the question: how do you bring clarity to healthcare in a way that's human? It led to building Luscii: holacratic, no managers, four-day weeks. Sold it to OMRON Healthcare, and stayed to introduce holacracy into the Japanese corporate while building AI-powered digital health at scale.
I wrote GREEN ON, a bestseller on the most productive and pleasant way to work. And I recently published AI Agents at Work, on how to actually implement AI. Both are born from doing, not observing.
My newsletter is about what I am learning along the way about digital health, AI, and self-organization in corporates. New post every other week (or so).
If you'd rather write than read, you can reach me at joris@jorisjanssen.com. I'll promise to read it.
Glad you are here.
Seven years, nobody left. Then someone did.
I was just back from two weeks of holiday, working through fourteen days of messages. Jetlagged, on autopilot. Flag for follow-up. Archive. Flag. Archive. Archive. The comfortable rhythm of inbox triage, where you can just cruise through everything before diving into deep work again.Then a Slack message from one of… Read more →
I gave all Luscii's engineers a full week to experiment with AI engineering: reflections on AI-enthusiasm, doubt, and why going slow might be the smarter move
Oh shitIt was the beginning of January, and I started experimenting with Claude Code. Just for myself, just for fun, just to see what the hype was all about. The first thing I wanted to try was to improve Glassfrog. Glassfrog is our SaaS holacracy tool, and I have been annoyed with it for years. It is slow, the… Read more →
What four months of chemo taught me about real human connection in healthcare
It was Friday January 6, 2023 and I found myself sitting in the waiting room of a hospital. The oncology department. My oncologist was running an hour late. Two days earlier I had learned that my cancer was back. It had metastasised. A 5cm malignant mass was now spreading across the lymph nodes in my belly. I would… Read more →
The Definitive Practice Guide for Leaders. A hands-on guide to implementing AI agents in your organization. From neural networks and RAG to guardrails, risk management, and real-world deployment.
What organizations can learn from special forces teams: hierarchy that dissolves under pressure, decisions that flow from expertise, defined roles and absolute trust.
Available for keynotes, panels, workshops, and fireside chats. Talks combine deep technical expertise with hands-on experience building and scaling organizations.
What AI agents can actually do today, and how leaders should think about implementing them. Cutting through hype to get to practical reality.
Lessons from running a 60-person company with 232 roles and zero traditional managers — what works, what doesn't, and what surprised us. Now applied inside a Japanese corporate.
Building Europe's #1 hospital home-monitoring platform. How technology can create space for care — and what it takes to scale health tech.
What high-performing military teams can teach us about working under pressure, distributed decision-making, and radical trust.
Three years ago, on a Friday at 5PM in January, my oncologist sat down with me for two hours. She had dinner plans, probably. Or a couch to collapse into. Instead she took the time to walk me through what the next four months of chemotherapy were going to feel like. Not the treatment, the experience. When she was done I felt calm. And I stayed calm for the entire treatment. In a way, it was the treatment. It changed the next four months.
It gave me a different perspective on building Europe's largest-scale remote patient monitoring system; keeping an eye on hundreds of thousands patients across hospitals in 11 countries, and giving medical professionals back thousands of years of their time for care. Globally, we connect millions people to their medical devices at home.
I'm fine now. But I think about that Friday a lot. As co-founder of a global digital health company, it became the question that jump-starts my day every morning: how do we bring clarity to people's health in a way that's accessible and human?
None of this was the plan. I started in AI research, got a PhD cum laude, published 31 papers, filed several patents. And I left academia because nothing we wrote about ever got built.
Over the last 15 years I have run a scale up instead. With zero traditional managers, 1200 distributed roles, and a four day work week at full pay. It proved something I already suspected: self-organizing teams are the key to our freedom and, at the risk of sounding like a corporate, a real competitive advantage.
Several books later — one about how teams should actually work, one about how leaders should actually implement AI instead of just talking about it — I now run one of the more unlikely experiments in management: introducing holacracy inside a large Japanese healthcare corporate.