https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36292289
> This is really a good essay and surely deserves a high profile, but it's disappointing that it, and some bits of angst about Valve's internal situation, seem to be the only discussions of organisational structure that get widely shared these days. Back from about the '70s to the early '90s it seems that there was quite a lot of management-theory/theory-of-the-firm research into different organisational structures and how they affected innovation, ability to change and other desirable or undesirable characteristics of organisations. And it didn't just stay hidden in academia, as the results got a fair amount of coverage in newsmagazines and the like in the early '90s. (Which is how I heard about it: I'm no expert.) As you might expect, the findings on relatively "structureless" orgs seem to have been pretty compatible with Freeman's observations. But there was also research on many other unusual forms of structure and hierarchy, for example the "matrix management" which famously got implemented at Dow Chemical in the 1970s https://hbr.org/1978/05/problems-of-matrix-organizations .
> But for some reason interest and attention seems to have completely faded out, at least at the popular level, by about 2000 or so. So the Valve situation gets reported on as if it's some kind of unprecedented novelty, and not an example of a sort of situation whose outcomes had been hashed out pretty thoroughly a decade or more earlier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporary_Autonomous_Zone
is of interest. In my mind the most interesting application of that was the contemporaneous Falun Gong movement in China.
Falun Gong practitioners would show up at a park and practice a set of simple physical and spiritual practices; the organization was deliberately structureless because organizations of all kinds in China are required to admit a cadre of Communist Party members to surveil and control the organization. No organization = no control network. (The very act of gathering a group of people at a point, however, is a basic practice of military science)
The one bit of authority in the organization is a book which is said to be infallible, which defends them from having the book rewritten by the authorities. (We know pretty well how the Communists and Republican governments oppressed folk religion movements such as the Huxian cult, but Taoism in its established form has always been some selection of folk practices which are approved by the authorities as long as China has had governments)
An unfortunate consequence of this is that Falun Gong cannot change any doctrine, such as their belief that "being gay is bad for your gong." They lost the support of mainstream western organizations and descended into pandering to right-wing nuts to get what support they could.
Matrix managment, holacracy, consensus, etc etc.
Is this a field where people discover things that last? For instance, fundamental limits to human communication, fundamental quantities that are conserved no matter what the configuration of management is.
Computer science has Brooks' observations on team size and communication, but that was only ever a guess, it's not really a law.
Generally people seem to adopt decision and management mechanisms that purport to address the pain they were having in their previous organization, while being proven enough to be plausible ("$FAMOUS_COMPANY does it") and not quantifiable enough to be a definite failure yet. Probably someone is writing a new airport book on "Founder Mode" right now!
So... what is known about human management? I'm not a fool, people are ever-changing and complex and what they want from their organizations changes all the time, but are there any eternal truths?
That is, a control system (management structure) needs to match the system it controls in complexity. [2]
This book lists many of the major variables you need to control to run a project [3] such as "hiring/managing employees", "communications with stakeholders", ... A project has a beginning and end, unlike the activities of an ongoing business, but the list in PMBOK is pretty exhaustive. A small project/organization doesn't required a dedicated part for each one of them but as you get larger you need HR, PR, the dedicated project manager and such.
[1] A reductivist statement, yes, but Ashby's law takes the reductivism out of reductionism.
[2] The index case is the Wright Brothers' flier. People thought aviation was a matter of lift and thrust but it's actually a matter of controlling roll, yaw and pitch so you don't tumble and had Galileo understood that he could have built a glider.
I think you know effectively the answer is no. Once you get past physiological needs, there aren't really any eternal truths for people. They need food, water air and to maintain a body temp.
After that, there are mostly generally observed things that hold for large groups of people. But there are always exceptions.
Is there any food that everybody loves? Any sport, any activity? It's hard to believe there would be a single thing that everyone wants in a system as complex as management in a company. Nothing that can be an eternal truth.
A bit tongue in cheek, but the closest is probably, keep your manager happy with you or get fired. But even that has exceptions.
I think a right-wing movement is more comfortable with the idea of social hierarchy, whether it is a formally structured group where "he who pays the piper pays the tune" [1] or the kind of group that the article describes where there are people who run the group without formal authority. There have been "left-wing" groups that have a strong hierarchy, such as Lenin's Bolsheviks, but groups like that have limited appeal to most people by the 1960s [2] [3]. There are also the various membership-based groups such as the Sierra Club and NOW which have limited effectiveness because they aren't accountable to members [4]
So conflicts like the above vex leftists because they'd like to put their egalitarian values to work.
My "3 year" case study was the time I was a leader in the Tompkins County Green Party. After the 2000 Ralph Nader campaign we had a lot of energy and decided we wanted to build an organization to contest local elections. We had luck early on taking advantage of fusion voting [5] to decisively settle a power struggle within the local Democratic party so people perceived we had power.
There were about 50 people who turned up to meetings, but 3 or 4 people had the time and energy to do the work, I don't think we formed a clique, we would have accepted just about anyone who was basically aligned with us and willing to put in the work. I ran a web site and plastered the town with posters and mostly did as I pleased except for the few times somebody said "you went too far with that poster", that is, most of the members were basically deferential to the people who did the work.
As time went on though the issue of being a spoiler [6] came up over and over again. We got a famous green thinker who was shortlisted for the 2004 Presidential race by the national party [7] to run for mayor, but people in our own party were afraid "if we run Glover, the cop is going to win". Each time we the prospect of running a candidate happened the group would split in half and by the 2004 race we couldn't really go forward because locally, statewide, and nationally we couldn't make up our mind if we even wanted to run a candidate. My strongly held opinion was "Fuck 'em" when it came to the Democrats and that a political party that didn't run candidates had no reason to exist; but I couldn't force that opinion on people that I felt a representative of and the other leaders felt the same way so we folded the organization up.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_network
[2] https://genius.com/The-beatles-revolution-lyrics
[3] A Leninist would say you're a poseur if you aren't part of an organization with the resolve and discipline to smash the capitalist class and the state the supports it.
[4] A case study in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty
[5] https://ballotpedia.org/Fusion_voting
[6] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/reflections-on-the-2000-u...
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-e&q=etoy+vs...
First you need to know how conformist the culture was in the 1990s, when my wife and I would visit Manhattan we looked like two hippie throwbacks to the 1960s and got told we were the weirdest looking people in the city. I couldn't have stood to live there because you would look up and see a Tommy Hilfiger billboard and look down and see a lot of people wearing Tommy and if you couldn't take it, you couldn't take it. You couldn't get as good of a cup of coffee as you could get at an indy espresso bar in a small town in a flyover state because there was a Starbucks on every block to convince stock market analysts that it was like that coast to coast.
In Dec 1999 there were the WTO riots which have broken the WTO ever since (e.g. the old "corn law" fight over free trade in agriculture reached the impasse it at now) and it had an effect that washed over everyone. For a few weeks there was a wave of honesty, for instance I saw an article in the tech press that somebody went to a Microsoft press conference and he was bored out his mind.
So when Etoy had their domain stolen by Etoys many people from radical artists to people who didn't want to have their private property taken away rallied. We had a system where people would visit our web site and we'd use iframes to DDOS their web site. It ran for a few days with no effect, then I contributed a code snippet that made the attack many times more effective and brought the site down for a short time during the last shopping day of the year. Immediately they called the FBI who pulled the server out of the rack.
We put a lot of effort into public relations and talking to the media, never mind flooding stock market discussion groups with propaganda. We knew we were being infiltrated by the FBI so we used the tactic of creating new mailing lists with (we believed) a clean list of participants periodically. (A general answer to "Eternal September" problems)
The stock dropped precipitously when we were working on it, and a few weeks later they settled with etoy, an event we knew about before it was announced at their earnings call. It wasn't a good earnings call and the stock price spiraled downward and eventually the company folded (might have been more than three weeks but the critical part was about that long)
The management and IT folks at Etoys would minimize the contribution of activists, wrote a blog about how they defeated our DDOS (but we scared them enough to call the FBI, caused a panic on the most critical day of the year, and could boast that the registration numbers that they triumphantly announced were inflated dramatically by fake users we injected) and would say that the company failed because the earnings were not good.
I would say, however, that Etoys could have been a viable business in the long term if investors believed in management, selling toys online in 1999 was an idea with legs. Activism contributed to investors not believing in management, so they were forced to throw in the towel.
I wrote something reasonably short here:
https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/to-grow-you-must...
I wrote something much longer here, but this material is mostly from other CTOs who I surveyed:
https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/a-survey-of-ctos...
If you are in New York City, we have 2 different speakers who will speak to 2 different aspects of this problem, at our event on February 27th.
Even spontaneous groups must filter for Competence. This is fundamental.
From domain-specific skills to planning and managing the sustainability of the project, a spontaneous group must be more than superficial associates and barnacles.
For a humorously timeless example, see the revolutionary movement in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
https://montypython.fandom.com/wiki/The_People%27s_Front_of_...