Are Bosses Necessary? A radical experiment at Zappos
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Whenever you have a flat hierarchy, informal structures will arise in place of explicit ones.
http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
"A "laissez faire" group is about as realistic as a "laissez faire" society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of "structurelessness" does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones."
Ultimately there are probably non-hierarchical models that allow for effective and interesting coordination in certain types of small organizations (viz the Kibbutz), but Holocracy seems like it's replacing Shit Umbrellas with Shit Centrifuges.
It reminds me of common rules of order, except untested by the courts and not covering the many, many permutations of motions that can arise.
I'd just be inclined to use Robert's Rules or a local equivalent. Meeting procedure works very well, when you use it correctly and consistently.
Another aspect which is overlooked in the article is: to get things done, you have to make unpopular decisions sometimes: i.e. cut features to make a deadline, to ship a version, to stop adding stuff and work towards a release. No-one wants to make those, they're called 'unpopular' for a reason. But you have to make them to avoid a state where things aren't ready and never will be. There's a difference between 'being able to ship' and 'being able to ship a usable product'.
Funny that they refer to Valve with the text:
> At the video-game maker Valve, new employees are told not to expect instructions, because even the managing director “isn’t your manager,” says the employee handbook. “You have the power to green-light projects. You have the power to ship products.” And so they do.
I'd like to mention 'Half Life 3'. ;)
You said that a given notion/idea is against human nature; the burden of proof is yours. Do you have any scientific support for that claim? What definition of "human nature" are you following? Even relating to the very limited historical accounts you were trying to assess, how can you be sure it's "human nature", not "human culture"?
I'm sure you're thorough and rigorous in your field of expertise, and don't accept "claims" blindly. I'm just asking for the same standards in other subjects. No need to be frivolous just because the subject is human behaviour.
> the challenge to find a counter-example to my argument is called proof by contradiction.
I don't think "proof by contradiction" means what you are "expecting", really. Look it up. You'll see why and how fallible it would be as a method for human and social sciences.
Standards? I think you are being a bit too hard on yourself and us. These are just comments on a web forum.
Exercise for the reader: If Holacracy is taking a pure free market as its model, why not just dissolve the company?
Hint: look up Ronald Coase.
Coase's question was: why don't we see the free market structure that linear algebra predicts? Why do firms exist?
His answer was fairly insightful. Markets impose search and transaction costs. To buy something from a market, you must search it for a seller and come to terms.
Inside a firm, that search cost may well be zero. Need HR services? Call HR. No need to look for a provider, negotiate a contract and so on. Need IT? Ring the support department. No need to weigh the virtues of IBM vs HP vs the corner store.
But sometimes it's the other way around. Need pens? In some companies the process is so onerous that you'll just go to the local store and buy your own.
That boundary moves around (consider the impact of IT, for example), but it's always there. If search and transaction costs fall to zero, the firm would in theory become unnecessary.
Comparing a market -- or a city -- to a firm is a mistake, because they are different structures emerging from different pressures on the same free agents.
Even though the individual is the indivisible element of a society, we as individuals inevitably take part in different organisations (financial, political, religious). In each of these more or less spontaneous organisations we assume a role and in some of these roles we will make decisions for several people.
The mayor is the elected leader, chosen by a majority, to make these decisions for us in a certain scope. You can't challenge his decisions on your own. If you don't like them, you either try to have someone else elected the next time or move elsewhere.
If you are catholic, the pope is also not our "boss", but boy does he have the power, legitimacy and support to influence a lot of people in arguably one of the most successful organisations to ever exist.
Don't get hung up on the "boss" word.
Blame-shifting doesn't always happen, but when it does, it almost universally goes down the hierarchy, not up.
https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3df50e/why_do...
> to get things done, you have to make unpopular decisions sometimes
...but I have no idea how this works in Holacracy.
One, having everyone in the company able to make executive decisions or at least influence them sounds great, but inevitably more outgoing and charismatic workers will gain influence, even when it's a supposed democracy. You can structure the system to have all the meetings and groups and power structures you want that seem equal on paper, but when someone is popular and outgoing often people will follow with that person. There are going to be people who slip into leadership roles--it's human nature, and trying to minimize that instead of steer it is impractical in my opinion.
The second thing is that having everyone in on the decision making is simply information overload in most cases. I think tasking everyone with being informed and voting on a wide array of things will make them either pretend to know all the issues properly and vote uninformed, or they'll vote the way they see their favoured peers voting. Maybe I'm letting my own experiences cloud my opinion here, since I work at a company that has a fairly flat managerial structure, but it's certainly a problem for me. If they're making executive decisions while not seeing what other ways the company is moving, that seems bad too.
I think there's definitely merit in promoting equality among employees, and it leads to better teamwork. But I just don't think that end of the extreme ever works particularly efficiently, and I think human nature tends to influence most companies toward the more normal business hierarchies.
It sounds great, but I wouldn't be surprised if they'll end up with all sorts of informal fiefdoms. What do you do when your informal boss is abusing their power? How do you take action to remove power from someone who never officially had it?
The seminal text is "We the People" (http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0979282705/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=...) [no affiliate]
The analogy would be how Scrum was created as a commercialized revision of Agile XP.
A key tenant is the rights of each circle (team/committee) to actively chose how it will make decisions, and it's free to use systems such as voting or putting someone "in charge", but it also has a bunch of innovative decision making approaches that achieve much better buy in and are based on achieving consent as opposed to consensus. It's the difference between, 70% of people are on board so we are going ahead regardless of what the rest think. And we'll we've heard from everyone and even those that have stated publically to try rest of the group that they have concerns they are no longer blocking "paramount" concerns and we are united in our agreeance to go ahead.
Scrum was developed independently of, and is quite distinct from, XP.
The problem is either a cultural one within the team (if he was scared to ask colleagues for help) or an induction one (if he didn't know how to ask for help, or didn't know he had to) or a communication one (if he had no way to contact infrastructure or anyone on his team) or a motivation/expectation setting one (if he felt like taking an in-office vacation, or that nobody would notice or mind if he did nothing) or a hiring one (if he didn't know what a computer was, or he was being intentionally uncooperative as some sort of protest against his own job)
All those problems are things I'd expect a competent line manager to address.
In reality what happened was that every one of them that was hired was made to think they were the silver bullet and now that they were there, everything would turn around, as long as we did things their way.
Well, you get a few executives on board who are in theory all on the "same level", all thinking they are the silver bullet, and all thinking that things need to be done their way and you can imagine the epic power struggles that ensued.
Did not end well.
I saw two problems there:
1. Most people don't want to make any decision.
2. The few people who want to make decisions, do it only for their personal gain. Deciding for stuff they like or they just like the prestige a decider-role brings.
I ended up in such roles, because I know 1. can be a big problem and before nothing happens, I just tell people what to do.
And I often quit jobs, because of 2. and the bigger the institutions get, the more of 2. you get.
Hsieh is asking a lot of his employees. I hope it ends up being worth the confusion and anxiety being generated for the entire workforce there.
[1] http://highscalability.com/blog/2015/10/7/zapposs-website-fr...