‘Flat’ company structures rarely work, but some firms aim for middle ground
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
In the end, I don't really see any real arguments against flat hierarchies in the article, it's basically a propaganda piece made to convince those who don't read beyond buzzwords.
I honestly wonder if a story like this, which basically consists solely of conjecture and the author's point they want to make, would ever have been greenlit at the NYT if it wasn't specifically pushing this "approved" narrative.
Nothing about political, socio-economic, geographic, cultural, educational, or 100's of other factors.
Some people think incorrectly on all topics in wild ways. This article does not(edit) provide evidence that '"diversity" is the only goal' for some people. I am sure you can find people like that, but this article is not good evidence for it or that they that they are a significant force in the work place.
I don't think diversity is the main reason they brought up theranos.
Does the traditional media even employ journalist's anymore? Seems to be most organization are very lacking in journalistic standards
It quotes some professor who says it's related because “you’ve still got middle-aged, privileged white men making decisions at the top” due to a lack of safeguards.
> Then the article tries to apply guilt by association, by basically saying "Theranos was bad, so flat structures are bad".
It quotes another professor who says that the lack of structure is what allowed theranos to avoid having controls that would catch things.
> It also implies a company being diverse is a mandatory thing, and non-diverse firms are somehow inherently bad or non-desirable.
Not so much implies as takes as a given, I think. That's been pushed hard for several years now, to the point I often see it treated as axiomatic.
The external sources may stand well by themselves I can not tell from these quotes.
> It quotes some professor who says it's related because “you’ve still got middle-aged, privileged white men making decisions at the top” due to a lack of safeguards.
This does not seem to depend on whether or not you have a flat structure or not. The article also includes:
> The companies may reflect the same biases as society, without safeguards to avoid them.
which is as close to a justification as the article comes to, which does not seem to apply more to flat organizations than not.
>> Then the article tries to apply guilt by association, by basically saying "Theranos was bad, so flat structures are bad".
> It quotes another professor who says that the lack of structure is what allowed theranos to avoid having controls that would catch things.
The quote from the article is:
> “meant that these companies don’t have to do the difficult and tedious process of putting into place all the systems and controls you would normally find.”
This is not particular to an organization being flat though. Flat does not me you do not have systems or and controls. If there is the a definition that makes it so I have not seen it used in the article or elsewhere.
There are trade offs between flat and non flat organizations, but I would not recommend this article form someone looking to read up on the topic.
> The companies may reflect the same biases as society, without safeguards to avoid them.
which is as close to a justification as the article comes to, which does not seem to apply more to flat organizations than not. »
There's been a fair bit of noise about needing HR departments in order to enforce safeguards (which depending on who you ask will look like standardized interview processes or quotas or whatever). That's hierarchy and structure.
« Flat does not me you do not have systems or and controls. »
Something that's nominally flat may not actually be flat in practice, yes. That's actually the main idea presented in "The Tyranny of Structurelessness".
> « Flat does not me you do not have systems or and controls. »
> Something that's nominally flat may not actually be flat in practice, yes. That's actually the main idea presented in "The Tyranny of Structurelessness".
You seem to be assume that flat organizations have zero structure and hierarchies. I have never seen the term used that way. 'flat' as in in flat organization is a coined term/phrase as far as I know so 'flat' is not 100% literal.
I have only see flat organization to mean less hierarchy relative to the standard. Often meaning there are fewer layers of managers between the ceo and the typical employee. I assume the term was coined to contrast the more pyramid like structure of managers that exist in some companies.
Said professor looking very pale and mature is a lifelong academic bureaucrat who would love to sell you an online MDA about the topic.
With over 30 years’ experience as an academic, Cliff has held positions at Queen Mary University of London, University of Leicester, King’s College, University of London, and Westminster University. He has also worked as an HR manager in local government.
Cliff’s research interests include the application of aspects of discourse, dramaturgy, tropes, narrative, and rhetoric to the study of organisations and organising.
https://online.bayes.city.ac.uk/courses/global-mba/teaching-...
Sure, but that's not sound logic. It doesn't actually prove it, it just tries to extrapolate bad behaviour from race and gender (which is what racism and sexism is)
> It quotes another professor who says that the lack of structure is what allowed theranos to avoid having controls that would catch things.
How is that exclusive to flat organisations? This logic can be used almost verbatim to hierarchical organisations as well - a strong hierarchy is what allowed Company X to avoid having controls that would catch things. (Because no one dared to say anything to the leadership)
> Not so much implies as takes as a given, I think. That's been pushed hard for several years now, to the point I often see it treated as axiomatic.
This is either propaganda or plain misinformation. I don't accept it in any way, it's definitely not an axiom.
It doesn't seem particularly worse than I'd expect a minor news article to be. Also, have you heard of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect?
In this case I think they could have done a better job providing the context and reasoning of the experts. That would not change the point of the article and hopefully give readers an idea, not all of the details, of why the quote experts think what they think.
As it is I do no think I can use the article to change my point of view, even incrementally, or better understand what and why others are thinking on the topic.
In a way, it's astonishing how much work has been done over at least the past one or two decades to renormalize racism and discrimination.
And for those who don't quite get what I mean: "Diversity" at least in the political sense is a racist concept, you can't be "diverse" without explicitly considering someone's race.
The original point of increasing diversity was to improve decision-making by not having basically an opinion bubble where everyone thinks the same way. So, companies tried to have non-traditional hires which would think differently than the existing employees. It only warped to what we know as "diversity" today later.
Diversity in the sense that people from various walks of life provide diverse(!) opinions is a very good thing. Getting stuck in thought bubbles is a very easy mistake to get into.
"Diversity" in the sense that people explicitly of a given race or sex be placed in a given seat to satisfy some "diversity" quota is not a show of diversity, it's just plain old discrimination.
To pursue minority candidates who are qualified, is in no way discrimination. Unless you assume they are less deserving intrinsically, then it's fair to include them in a search.
Why would those candidates be excluded? Because white guys might suffer? That's a bankrupt argument at the core.
Fairness, the the privileged, looks like discrimination every time.
The comment you are replying to is saying that having demographic quotas is bad.
There's an implied disagreement about what is (what companies are actually in practice doing), but I don't see any disagreement about what should be.
The idea that anything that considers race is racist is either naive or foolish. We currently exist in a society that was built on white supremacy at its core. People of color are still actively being harmed by it, and white people are still benefiting from it to this day. To ignore that history and it's current and lasting effects is complacency in a racist system.
Consider this: if all were truly equal, companies of sufficient size would be diverse by default, being essentially a truly randomized subset of a diverse population. DEI initiatives would be a noop. Why is that not the case?
It's all explained pretty well in Paul G's Maker Schedule vs Manager Schedule.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/05/business/flat-structure-c...
Flat structures aren't flat. When they work, there is always a single strong leader who everyone defers to in a hub/spoke pattern, and what makes the person exceptional is they can get people to work together. The necessary condition is ownership.
Where I have seen most flat structures fail is the moment when either that leader leaves and the ensuing vaccuum leaves a power struggle to re-establish an order, or the central person's role is diluted by another source of power like a marquee customer account where someone else emerges and becomes the cargo cult broker of, "well I'm not responsible, but the customer wants X, are you going to argue with the invisible customer?"
A successful flat org has a concept of "us," and the failed ones use the concept of "you." The worst pattern is when someone is granted some positional authority but has zero charisma, vision, or ownership, and delcares a flat organization, and then just uses it as a reason to micromanage and veto, while enjoying the attention of people having to vie for their mercurial approval. These kind of managers are just avoiding ownership and responsibility. The incompetent neglect creates a power struggle on the team that rewards the worst in people, and you get a low trust, sabotaging, gossipy, hyper political environment.
High ownership is the quality you are probably looking for, a flat organization is probably just low responsibility management.
So they're essentially unworkable as a company gets beyond maybe 50-100 individuals as that is maximum for a unified human social group taking into account that people have social connections outside of work as well?
As a paid subscriber, I used the tool to share w/o paywall in the link I posted to HN, to avoid need for archive.is link:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/05/business/flat-structure-c...
It seems HN stripped that, sorry.
Set reader mode and refresh. Or at least that seems to work for me, on Firefox on both mobile and desktop.