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Comment by aNoob7000 | Hacker News Reader

I don't get your response. You praise a manager that's like a servant and does all the blocking and tackling for you and all with a smile, but yet you want Zappos' flat organizational structure.

I know plenty of creators that don't want to spend their days blocking and tackling. Most "creators" just want to sit in front of their computers all day getting stuff done. With Holocracy those creators you talk about would assume more responsibilities and can no longer hide behind the servant.

Lastly, why are middle managers always seen in such a poor light? Why isn't a CEO/CFO/CIO seen in a lesser light since they really don't produce anything.

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Who said I don't see C's in a lesser light?

And yes, I used this post as an opportunity to rant about managers in a vertically structured company, but I see no reason why the type of manager I prefer could not exist at Zappos. In fact, it seems like it would be more likely to occur, given that they would no longer outrank the creators.

Without me, my keyboard will achieve nothing. Without a manager, a good developer will go on trying to create value.

The purpose of the manager is not to squeeze productivity out of a developer as you might blood out of a stone (although some seem to think it is), but to try to make sure that the developers are working on the right stuff for the company. In a healthy organisation, that can be done as part of a dialogue with the developers and takes the form primarily of communication.

> The purpose of the manager is not to squeeze productivity out of a developer as you might blood out of a stone (although some seem to think it is), but to try to make sure that the developers are working on the right stuff for the company

In my experience that responsibility has fallen on the CEO or the Product people.

I have to disagree here. Much waste is created by founder developers precisely because they can code, but they are not necessarily creating value ( I'm just as guilty ). Good managers / the business, call it whatever you will figure out the priorities, the desires of the stakeholders, help prioritize and more. Any producer (not just a developer) left to their own devices builds what they want to build, and that's not necessarily valuable to the customers or the business. So I agree with your second part, but not the first.

> Any producer (not just a developer) left to their own devices builds what they want to build, and that's not necessarily valuable to the customers or the business.

For a good developer "what they want to build" in the context of their job is at least somewhat informed by what they think will be valuable for their company. Now, it's completely true that developers might be prone to particular kinds of getting it wrong (let's build a framework!), but that's true for any kind of person including managers.

Point being, managers are there to help make sure that the producers are informed and aligned about the wider context.

> Why isn't a CEO/CFO/CIO seen in a lesser light since they really don't produce anything.

Consider Apple. Apple had a series of CEOs who were unable to stem the slide into bankruptcy. Enter Jobs, who turns a company 90 days from bankruptcy in the biggest corporation in the world. He did this with the same group of employees.

The only thing that changed at Apple was the CEO.

I was under the impression that Jobs replaced a lot of the Apple senior management with his people from NeXT. To the point where there were jokes that it was NeXT taking over Apple, not the other way round.

Part of a CEOs contribution is to install the right management team, and if that is what he did, it was something the previous line of CEOs did not do.

I don't like to use Apple as a evidence for anything. Steve and Apple are such outliers that using them as evidence supporting any conjecture is extremely problematic. About the best you can say is that they are proof that every rule has an exception.

The CEO decides what problems to solve an in general how to solve them. It's like a general on the battlefield - and military history shows how extraordinarily dependent an army is on the decisions of its generals.

Consider how Microsoft has rather dramatically changed course with the ascension of Nadella, with an equally dramatic effect on the stock price. This is very clearly a result of the CEO changing direction.

Company culture as well flows down from the top, this becomes clear if you've worked for different corporations.

If the CEO doesn't matter, I wonder who would risk $billions in corporate valuation installing some random guy off the street rather than a carefully selected person.

Walter I am not disagreeing that the CEO matters, just that Apple and Steve are not good models for anything. I have seen far too much obnoxious behaviour explained off as “Steve did x and Apple was a success so I will do it too”.

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