Revolutions Don't Start in Boardrooms. They Start With Beer

He said the entire idea of Buurtzorg, now the global example of a large self-managed care organization, was built on evenings of “beers and nuts” with his friend Ard Leferink.

No strategy decks. No consultants. No multi-million-euro transformation programs.

Just two people, a table, some snacks, some beers, and one essential ingredient: the freedom to dream together.

Those conversations became the blueprint of a revolution in Dutch healthcare.

A revolution now spreading across the world today.​

A brewery full of rebels

This year, our own Corporate Rebels Summit felt exactly like that.

Hundreds of workplace pioneers gathered in the legendary Moritz brewery in Barcelona. A place that still produces beer, and for two days also produced ideas.

Everywhere you looked, small groups were sitting together, challenging, sketching, dreaming, disagreeing, laughing.

And in the evenings, many of us stayed long after the program had ended, continuing the conversation over a beer.

Not because we had to. But because it’s often in those relaxed, unguarded moments that the real breakthroughs show up.

Something special happened: people from Rebel Cells all over the world (Spain, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Japan, Switzerland, Poland, Lithuania, and more) brought their local stories, frustrations, experiments, and courage into those conversations.

Those shared beers didn’t just deepen personal connections; they quietly strengthened the global network that is powering this workplace revolution.

A network of local cells that support each other, challenge each other, and spread ideas faster than any formal organization ever could.

From Barcelona to Prague

Watching it all unfold reminded me of Václav Havel’s story: the dissident playwright who helped spark the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia.

Under communism, almost every space in the Eastern European country was controlled: offices, phones, neighborhoods, even friendships.

But pubs were different. They were noisy, smoky, crowded. And therefore impossible to fully police.

Because of that, pubs became small islands of freedom inside an unfree society.

Havel would slip into these pubs not to hide, but to breathe. To sit with friends, drink a beer, and speak and dream openly without scripts or fear.

In a system built on enforced conformity, the simple act of honest conversation became an act of resistance.

Because in those pubs, Havel and his friends weren’t just sharing beers.

They were practicing what he later described in his famous essay The Power of the Powerless: the simple but radical act of living in truth.

The power of the powerless

Havel argued that revolutions don’t begin with grand gestures, but with ordinary people refusing to play along with the lies of a system.

He talked about tiny acts of honesty that slowly erode the structures built on fear.

And those pub conversations he spoke about became exactly that: small pockets of truth in a world of enforced silence.

He later described these evenings as moments where people rediscovered what it meant to be human: to speak truth, to think together, to imagine something different.

Those conversations, scattered across countless pubs, slowly wove a network of courage and connection that the regime couldn’t detect and couldn’t stop.

And when the Velvet Revolution erupted in 1989, the revolution was born in those pubs, cultivated over years of whispered conversations.

Years later, when Havel became president, he refused to give that up. He kept sneaking out to his favorite pubs.

Even when his security team panicked, the myth goes, Havel would just smile and say:

“A president who cannot sit in a pub among citizens is not a free man.”

Freedom begins with connection

For Havel, beer was never about alcohol. It was about freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and freedom of connection.

It represented exactly the kind of unmonitored, authentic space where real change begins.

And that’s what the Summit reminded me of.

Whether it is:

• two friends imagining Buurtzorg over nuts and beers…
• dissidents gathering in a Prague pub to keep the flame of freedom alive…
• or pioneering organizations from all corners of the world meeting in an old brewery in Barcelona to connect their local revolutions into one global movement…

All big change begins the same way:

With small groups of people who feel free enough to say what they really think.

That’s the real engine of every revolution.

Including ours.

Want to join your local Corporate Rebels community? Apply here.