Where’s the list of awesome companies that succeed without managers?
Here is evidence that claim CEOs produce more value than they are compensated for (i.e. they are underpaid): https://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/steven.kaplan/research/kceo... https://econpapers.repec.org/article/inmormnsc/v_3a60_3ay_3a... https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1686068
Just because they are there doesn’t mean the achievements are due to them.
There have been a number of attempts, tens of millions of dollars spent on one study alone, trying to quantify what technologies and people generate value.
The meta-conclusion considering all the studies I know of (traveling and not looking them up), is the math becomes so Byzantine it’s a pointless measure and we should just stick with ideology to avoid blowing up society in people’s minds (an idea that was peddled for thousands of years already, reaffirmed by math, glad we spent the time on it.)
Just because we’ve emotionally conditioned ourselves to engage our mechanical agency towards these ends does not imply it’s because of management.
Manufactured consent is a thing.
Management is necessary to allocate resources (including labor) efficiently at scale, but it comes with overhead.
As such, at smaller companies, startups, small businesses, the overhead of management can be outsized, the pain felt acutely when compared relatively to the actual output of ICs and such.
At larger companies, the massive cadre of management which is necessary to keep the machine running is also very obvious, as the overhead of a large organization is very large, even if the management itself is excellent and highly efficient.
As such... How does one allocate credit? An analogy would be like financing or investment. Necessary. A filtering mechanism. Sometimes helpful in an advisory mechanism. But are they the ones creating output? No. But do they deserve some credit? If something cannot be done without it, then they must deserve SOME credit, it's just a question of how much.
A healthy society takes a village. IMO there’s plenty of literal history to show isolating a minority from the demands the rest of us face is ripe for abuse at scale.
One person did not invent languages, lay down the highways and invent computers.
All the people we hold up relied not just on the historical invention to push them forward but society giving them space and not killing them. Every individual inventor is outnumbered.
IMO that space to be and do is what we should optimize for. Not a tether to tradition of emotionally wanking off a handful over what is ultimately a linguistic twist on an idea that was discovered/defined collectively
At least for Medium, "Holacracy" pretty much imploded. Zsppos switched from it to an internal marketplace - which is, oddly, controlled by excecutives.
Flat organizations beyond a certain size either move away from flatness officially, create unacknowledged hierarchy, or fail. I'm really not aware of a single large-scale example that still works.
This is much different for small orgs - there's something about org size that requires some sort of centralization. (I think it's communications overhead + complexity exceeding the limit of what a single person can keep in their mind. I'm not 100% convinced, but these are the pressure points I usually see)
Flat organizations are unusual, but survive about as well as other similar organizations. The difference is when a giant reorganization/buyout etc hits, they more obviously change into something else.
Github made it all the way until 2014 (and was a massive success by then) too, IIRC.
Yeah, you can fake through it more than half of the time, comfortably. Just be eloquent, tall, and loud.
But that all aside... I mean they have a new Half Life game on the near term horizon (later this month apparently) and they have done a ton of work on VR and Linux support.
Summary: the game was brilliant ("uniquely amazing") if you were really good at it but was essentially impossible to get into, and its economy was badly constructed.
Most Startups are at least trying to change the status quo.
Steam certainly challenged the status quo when it was released, and several times in its life.
Hell, who else is working on Linux gaming right now? They were relatively early on game streaming, VR. Steam Workshop? How cool is it that a large amount of one of their flagship games, Team Fortress 2, not only integrated a lot of third party content, but also paid creators back? How cool is it that many games like Counter Strike began as Half Life mods?
I don’t really use Steam much anymore, so it’s not that I’m personally attached much, but I will admit to being pretty impressed.
Also, valve's ther ventures are....massively successful. The microtransaction model in gaming originated with Valve, and now the entire mobile and freemium gaming markets use that business model.
So in this case...I would say yes, everything valve has done as a company trying to make money in the last 10 years is par for other successful SAAS platforms.
Xbox Live.
Steam/valve was brought up because they have a successful cloud SASS model with no subscriptions oand a flat org structure.
Xbox live has a subscription fee since day 1, is maintained by MS (the definition of "non-flat organizational structure"), and is vendor locked. Not even remotely comparable.
This is what 'agile' is supposed to emulate for larger businesses.