Can Valve's 'Bossless' Company Model Work Elsewhere?

glowend writes "I just listened to a fascinating podcast with Valve's economist-in-residence, Yanis Varoufakis, about the unusual structure of the workplace at Valve where there is no hierarchy or bosses. Teams of software designers join spontaneously to create and ship video games without any top-down supervision. Varoufakis discussed the economics of this Hayekian workplace and how it actually functions alongside Steam — a gaming platform created by Valve. I kept wondering: assuming that his description of Valve is accurate, can this model work for other tech companies?"

Comments

No

[GeneralTurgidson]

Too many entrenched managers who provide nothing to the company.

Re:No

[gweihir]

Too many entrenched managers who provide nothing to the company.

The managers are not the only problem (albeit usually the largest one). Incompetent or unmotivated "craftsmen" (engineers, artists, ...) are the second problem as they will either try to become managers themselves or be unable or unwilling to temporarily assume management functions. And the third problem is anybody with a lust for power, although that often coincides with being incompetent.

Re:No

[phantomfive]

The work will get done, and our industrial processes can produce enough for everyone.

I don't think that's really true. I sure wouldn't be doing that work. I would be doing some work, but it would be work for me, that I enjoy. The world would look like the open source landscape at best. At worst we'd have no garbage collectors.

Re:No

[davydagger]

we are already enslaved. those who produce the wealth in the first place don't own it at all. someone else fucking does.

workers are still capable of producing goods and services without bosses.

bosses cannot produce goods or services without workers.

Re:No

[Your.Master]

If they stay at home instead of working, then they aren't motivated by the money they could earn.

Capitalism runs on the assumption that people are motivated by the marginal differences in income between jobs. This continues to operate under the universal basic income scenario. Otherwise, there can only be intra-industry salary competition and never inter-industry.

This reminds me of an economist's thought experiment -- let's say there are two widgets, a premium one for $200 and a knock-off for $100. The premium one is legitimately better, so you intend to buy that one, but the knock-off would do and if you were tight on money you could get by with that. You will only ever need one of these widgets.

You get to the store, and actually find that there's an ill-conceived doorcrasher sale. Widgets are all uniformly $100 cheaper. The knock-off is now free and the premium one is now $100. What do you get now?

A lot of people instinctively say they'd take the knock-off because it's free, but if you're a rational actor you should stick with your original choice, because the difference between the knock-off and the premium one, both in terms of costs and benefits, has not changed at all, whatsoever.

In reality, people aren't rational, so they will shift to the knock-off sometimes. But we also aren't talking about a one-day-only sale. People want luxuries, so they'll work.

There have been some positive experiments with this in the past (eg. Canada tried http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome and came out with some pretty positive results, although they knew this was not permanent so that could affect behaviour) and there are lots of places that have a partial basic income guarantee without imploding, though long term full basic income guarantees in otherwise-capitalist-leaning countries are scarce. An experiment in a poorer nation actually registered an increase in economic activity: http://www.bignam.org/BIG_pilot.html.

I have no doubt there are downsides to this, or even really advocating for it, I'm just trying to counter the "dumbest idea" that you put forward. Like most economic ideas, it's not obviously stupid or obviously smart, because just about nothing about economics is simple.

Re:No

[drakaan]

If you're talking about welfare for all, working or not, then the question is where that money comes from. Is there some endless hole of wealth that is supposed to prop us up? I understand the intent, but the mechanics of this idea have either been very poorly explained or won't work any better than a traditional ponzi scheme.

Like Most Companies?

[Art Challenor]

Isn't this how most companies work? In order to get anything done, you form an ad-hoc group of capable people to work on a project.

Seems to me the only difference is that in a normal company that group then has to figure out how to outflank the management hierarchy in order to complete the project, whereas this model skips that step.