Slashdot Mirror
'First, Let's Get Rid of All the Bosses' -- the Zappos Management Experiment
schnell writes: The New Republic is running an in-depth look at online shoe retailer Zappos.com's experiment in a new "boss-less" corporate structure. Three years ago the company introduced a management philosophy that came from the software development world called "Holacracy," in which there are no "people managers" and groups self-organize based on individual creativity and talents. (When the change was announced, 14% of the company's employees chose to leave; middle management openly rebelled, but perhaps surprisingly the tech organization was slowest to embrace the new idea). The article shows that in this radically employee-centric environment, many if not most employees are thrilled and fulfilled, while others worry that self-organization in practical terms means chaos and a Maoist culture of "coercive positivity." Is Zappos the future of the American workplace, a fringe experiment, or something in between?
welcome our new <null-pointer> overlords!
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
So how do I get a raise in such an environment? How do I differentiate myself from my coworkers? This has Lord of The Flies written all over it. Or that Simpsons episode where Martin ends up in a bird cage.
Microsoft though this was a clever idea once as well, firing all the low-mid level managers in engineering (senior management was safe of course) and keeping just the engineering team leads. Today, first-level managers have the job title "Lead", and nothing else has changed. "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."
Zappos is part of Amazon, of course, so this could be a contained experiment to see how it goes before a larger scale move. I suspect it will go the same way as MS. First level people managers serve a vital role (whether the individuals in that role are competent is a different question) in preventing "drama", and hiring, training, and retaining the best. Mid-level managers may be mostly useless overhead promoted out of harm's way, but someone needs to decide what projects are worth funding, and what projects aren't worth continuing, from a business perspective. Those roles will be filled again eventually. "And their beards have all grown longer overnight."
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
TFA is a description of what a holacracy is, and how it should work. And the people quitting when the experiment was announced. Not a detailed report of the theory in practice.
And while TFA glows about it, the reports I've read about the Zappos experiment [citations not committed to memory] indicate that after a year, it was hard to get issues like "getting from the office to the parking structure at night is physically dangerous because of changes since the holacracy took over" solved.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Anybody know a good place to bury bodies in the Austin area?
A "bossless" environment may work somewhere (I can't think of any off the top of my head) but there are lots of situations and jobs that need a "boss" or some authority to direct things, settle disputes, parcel out tasks, etc etc etc.
This sounds like some fuzzy feel-good bullshit that came from tumblr and leaked into the real world.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I used to evangelize to people about this place and then everything about them started to suck. Their prices were always the best and they had amazing customer service. All that seems to have changed now. Coincidence?
The problem with a lot of leaders is that after they achieve some initial (and maybe even really big and sustained) success, they start to see it as validation of stupid ideas they may have on other things that are not related. And they begin to view their companies as experimental labs for their personal unvetted ideas. This is dangerous.
You saw it in Google's daycare fiasco where some progressive schooling agenda was rolled out, leaving lots of parents with no affordable option for their kids because an executive wanted this, and everyone else had to follow. There are other (better) examples too.
I get the sense that this is the same kind of thing in action. A CEO has some utopian dream about a fully collaborative workplace where everyone is equal, meritocratic, and maybe actually some noble goal of making a better company.
But the thing you learn about groups of people over time is that not everyone can or wants to be equal all the time, and have a content-based battle for leadership every day of their lives. Sometimes you just need a factory workplace to get stuff done, and you don't need everyone to be equal and coming up with ideas every day of their lives. People often want someone to be the leader, to take the responsibility, say what others need to do, and they do it. You evaluate how it went, and try another idea where someone else leads.
You can see examples of this in your own workplace, your friends, your family. You very rarely will see a successful or satisfying group structure where everyone has to debate every decision all the time and be thinking on their toes to do it. It's tiring, and sometimes very much the opposite of what you need to happen. Get a group of friends together where no one feels they can say what the evening's plan should be and I think you get the frustrating picture.
Go home, start making dinner, and debate and negotiate with your spouse and kids about every step of the process because it's sure to make it better, right? I suggest you try it in your life before rolling it out to 1000 employees as the company policy.
At the very least, you have to look at when they started to suck -- before or after they were bought by Amazon?
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
"Maverick" is a must read for any business owner.
They pioneered the different philosophy of complete transparency and making all employees partners.
It made a huge, positive difference for their business.
Ahh yes, the company that couldn't even get my wife's shoe size right. Twice. Yeah I promised myself not to do business with them after they got snotty about it. But I wish them luck in their endeavor, lol.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I don't feel like reading the whole thing, but I have a strong suspicion that the thing is bullshit. I'll admit I don't really know, but I wouldn't trust what I was told about this unless I saw it for myself over an extended period of time, but I've worked with/in/for a lot of different companies and groups, nonprofits and businesses, and I've seen a few try various schemes to do away with "managers" and "hierarchy". At least in my experience so far, it doesn't work.
You might think that the problem is that the system breaks down and becomes chaotic, that without guidance, workers will allocate resources badly. But that's not quite the problem that I've seen. The problem is more that some kind of hierarchy always forms. In the end, someone takes the role of "the boss" and people still do what the boss says. The boss may be making speeches about how he's not "the boss", but he's your friend. He says he'll listen to you, he'll take your input and criticisms seriously, and you shouldn't feel like this is a hierarchy. He may spend quite a long time talking about the benefits of not having a "boss" or a "hierarchy", and how it continues to work out so well for your company, but when push comes to shove, he'll make a unilateral decision and expect you to go along with it. And he'll also have some people that he likes more than others-- whether for personal or professional reasons-- and those people will be able to tell other people what to do, too. They'll be the de facto middle-management.
So it really becomes an issue of terminology rather than organization. There's no "hierarchy", but some people are more important and influential than others. There are not "managers", but you'll find yourself answering to one or more of those "more influential" people. The change in terminology creates a lot of feel-goodery for the management team, but in the best cases, it's just a hierarchy by other names. Unfortunately, the informality of the hierarchy tends to lead towards cronyism rather than egalitarianism.
It all depends on what the product is in and how the business needs to interact with the customers. However, in certain environments that it works in - I believe steam works in this way. However, I can definitely see this not working in other business, but can be viable in a Tech-only company.
This looks like an excellent experiment for someone else's company to do.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Self directed/managed teams are not new. However to be successful the team must consist of people with high expertise in the various areas where things need to be done. Plus they need to have goal oriented personalities and be team players, willing to do a dirty/uninteresting task at times to get the team to where it needs to be. And most importantly open minded when discussing how to solve a problem, complete a task, etc amongst fellow team members, willing to put one's own idea aside and adopt a colleagues. In other words this sort of structure is not for most people. It can work but the team members must be very carefully and thoughtfully selected.
The leaders will still be there, they just won't be recognized as such. It's another way to be politically correct, just by not saying certain taboo words.
I'm reminded of a big soccer league in the Houston area, where they officially do not keep score in any of the games. They want everybody to just play for the enjoyment of the game, and no one to feel inferior to others. But the reality is that everybody not only knows the score, but they know the win-loss record of every team. They just aren't allowed to say it officially.
Zappos, I'm sure, has the same kind of thing going on.
Who is going to make all the money and take all the credit?
The biggest issue I have with Mr. Hsieh is that one of his core values is employees should be motivated by factors other than compensation. I can certainly agree with the premise but the problem is he doesn't offer much in exchange for the lack of compensation. Employees are exposed to all the difficulties of a young, startup atmosphere, including long hours, uncertain work/living environment (move to downtown uprooted lots of employees), volatile policies (holacracy implementation), etc... But employees get none of the benefits that normally come with those issues, specifically compensation.
When Tony sold Zappos to Amaozn he became a centimillionaire several times over. Yet none of the rank and file earned a penny off the sale, per Tony's core belief that employees shouldn't be motivated by compensation, which apparently includes equity compensation as well. If you're going to treat your employees like guinea pigs for your social theory experiments at least give them some carrots for the distressful uncertainty it creates.
They rebelled because they don't want to do what they managers do. Decisions the managers make don't just go away because no one in charge is there to make them.
I had a job when I was in college where, in the latter days, I was promoted to a senior position in a campus computer lab that had managerial aspects in addition to the technical stuff I did before. I got that position because I knew my stuff, helped organize the lab, and was a senior worker there (in a workplace staffed by college students, it doesn't take long to attain seniority). I hated it. HATED. Worst time I've ever had in my career. The point in the semester where I was supposed to submit performance evaluations.. I dreaded that. These were decisions that would affect peoples' salaries. Affect whether they were kept on. Affect what they heard from the "real" managers. For a guy who wanted to code and set up servers and tinker, it was a stressful distraction.
I think a lot of geeks are like that. They don't want to be the manager. They don't want to be involved with those sorts of decisions. But there are so many things that a good manager will do to remove that burden from the geek. They can manage inter-personal conflicts. They can decide the direction that the department will go in. Most importantly, they can negotiate with other departments. If the tech department has no advocate who can explain in plain language the pros and cons of technical decisions, then other departments are going to make those decisions for the tech department without any input from them. I'm sure there are a lot of geeks who are now saying "oh, it's already like that everywhere." It's not. In particularly dysfunctional environments it can be, but in places where various departments have a good managerial staff, at least executives can understand what the risks involved are, and what is realistic. I understand the temptation to replace bad managers with no managers, but I can't see how "getting rid of all the managers" will improve that situation.
there's four places. There's the Hammock Hut, that's on third. There's Hammocks-R-Us, that's on third too. You got Put-Your-Butt-There.That's on third. Swing Low, Sweet Chariot... Matter of fact, they're all in the same complex; it's the hammock complex on third.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
If the right people are involved, this could be great. If the wrong folks are there, a disaster. The fact that some chose to leave and some to stay shows the filtering for folks who may flourish in this environment. Interesting to see how well they compete for customers, capital and workers.
This was also a big contributing factor to Page and Brin being relegated to the kids table for a while until they were mature enough to run the company on their own.
"It's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get." -- H. J. Simpson
In 40 years 80% of the work will be done by AI/Robotics.
Even the word is stupid. The site doesn't seem to give any explanation of where it came from. Perhaps they all greet each other in Spanish?
Now maybe it's due to other words (dem~, theo~, aristo~) or maybe I did too much chemistry, but I want to read it as "halocracy", which would mean rule by salt.
I doubt in practice that would be much worse.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Somebody has to deal with the board of directors, senior managers, and large clients, ensuring that they're wishful thinking and lack of technical expertise doesn't destroy any chance that the project will be successful.
I can spend my time explaining to the suits what is possible and what isn't , or I can architect and code the project. Which do you want me to do? Someone has to manage expectations and point out that fast-tracking one thing means delaying another. That's called management. Somebody has to do it. If I spend my day doing management, I can't spend it coding - and vice-versa. Forcing techies to deal with political BS and "dumb" executives is a sure way to piss them off. Many of us would rather have a good manager insulate us from the stupid.
This isn't a corporation it's a cult.
What does it mean, really, for all employees to bring their full creativity to work? They're a SHOE SELLING WEBSITE. Unless Hsieh has figured out a way integrate basket weaving into tech, sales, marketing or leadership he doesn't really need/want "full creativity" and he's just leading everyone down Jim Jones way. He's a true 21st century shaman priest because he can't deal with his success so he thinks he's superman and he has to impose his vision of a utopian future upon the rest of the world to make it better because he's "superman". (Just like every other megalomaniac the world has seen like Hitler (there I've invoked Godwin), Alexander the Great or Khan (Genghis, not Noonian...)
It's BS.
I've worked the gauntlet of companies from startups to radically successful small companies to stifling mega-corps (Why yes, your team of 4 built a fully working system in 6 months but we need to hire mega-contractors for 5 million to rewrite it all because then it'll be "legit"). I'm now working for a company that's trying to go Agile because even though they were wildly successful with traditional methods Agile was gonna solve their weaknesses. Well guess what, they've STILL got the same weaknesses (it's hard to estimate dev time for wholly new systems, political blockers, fuzzy requirements, fuzzy design) but now development is faltering because everyone's spending more time trying to make sure all the agile paperwork is up to date rather than putting all their effort into the products themselves!
That's not to say Agile is worthless but my point is that a process is only as good as the people implementing it. Not the other way around. So what does that make our company? Orange? Teal? Green? Plaid? (Can't... do...plaid!).
Producing products (those evil evil materialists) requires a unified goal. Unified goals do not come out of self-discovery. They come out of one man or a small team with a unified vision. People can then choose to work towards that unified vision or not but the end result is the same - the effort and energy output is ONE way towards the team and up the chain of command (or to the people driving the vision). You want happy people Hsieh? Pay them well, simplify their workload and give them dependability that their job will be there so they can have the comfort and psychological energy to discover life themselves as they want it. Not as you want to impose it you tinpot dictator with delusions of godhood.
That would be government by holes, wunnit?
They should take it in turns to serve as a sort of execeutive-officer-for-the-week.
So instead of having jobs, in Holacracy people have roles. Each role belongs to a circle rather than a department, and circles are guided not by managers but by lead links.
So it sounds like you still have the same hierarchical management structure as before, out of organizational necessity. Except you've renamed the roles and the managers / lead links have the same added responsibility but no extra pay
I have no idea how things are at Zappos, but my previous employer was definitely the anti-Zappos, that's for sure. I worked in the US office of a European telecom I don't want to name. They don't deserve the publicity even a bad mention would bring them. Few Americans have even heard of them or their parent company. My former employer tried laying off American employees but keeping their managers, apparently under the belief that if all those pesky benefit sucking employees left, real work could get done by the managers. I've never seen or heard of anything like it. Offices would be gutted and the managers would keep their jobs, even if they had no direct reports any more. My manager had at one time perhaps 12 direct reports and he ended up with 2, both of which were told that they were only sticking around long enough to shut down and box up some servers in our small local computer room. I lost track of my manager but the last I heard he still was employed there. Exactly what these "valuable" managers were doing to stay employed is a complete mystery to me. We outsourced a lot of jobs, including the ones my group did, to various 3rd world countries where we had offices and those people all had local managers who reported one way or another to our HQ in Europe so all these American managers weren't being used to manage overseas employees. The only other thing I can tell you is that my former employer has continued to gut its American workforce since I left so that didn't seem to indicate that going to a "managers only" approach was working very well in the USA. Our sales were truly terrible in North America when I left and it seems that they got worse afterward. What a shock.
Yes. I used zappos all the time, then suddenly it became difficult to order things that were listed as "in stock", once the shoes were found, our credit card info was compromised on their site and I had to cancel the card. Seems that losing some of their talent is having a negative impact.
The article shows that in this radically employee-centric environment, many if not most employees are thrilled and fulfilled
These are the worthless fucks you don't want anyway.
while others worry that self-organization in practical terms means chaos and a Maoist culture of "coercive positivity."
The ones doing the actual things that need to get done in order for people to get pay checks
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Seems that losing some of their talent is having a negative impact.
But the ones who are left are 'thrilled and fulfilled'.
Which is what really matters.
Because they are the low level employees you'd fire anyway. They get to fuck off all day and shirk their responsibilities. If I got to get paid for fucking off all day I'd be pretty happy too. At this point the Zappos employees who are left are barely qualified to ask "would you like fries with that?"
Just like open source... it's the way everything is going to be done. Think about the hierarchy now... does not work... at all.. Every boss is a yes man and everything goes to shit.
Cory Doctorow had much to say about this. I don't think it will work out as well as the Bitchun society.
The problem is not a management structure. It is having bad managers. A hierarchal structure works perfectly fine as long as the managers actually know how to manage.
The mistake most companies make is making someone a manager based on the ability to do their job. Just because you are a great developer doesn't mean you are going to be a great manager of developers. This method is doubly stupid when you consider that by promoting your best performers to a management role, you are decreasing your efficiency, since you just took one of your best performers out of the mix.
If you are looking for the best manager, you have to look beyond the performance of the job to the softer skills that actually make great managers, which could be in folks who aren't that great at coding. However, you also need to develop a non-management track to keep those great coders from topping out too quickly, but also allows them to continue to contribute.
The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.
You get a group of 12 people in a sub-department. The type A leadership types naturally take over decision management and keeping the group on task. They don't get paid any more for doing a manager level work. Wow, what a smart concept!
Oh yes it's a huge new threat we now face- the workplace might cease to resemble so closely a pirate ship where every ship is out to scuttle destroy and otherwise steal from the others and the people who work on each pirate ship have no loyalty that's not coerced by the threat of being thrown overboard .
Where the interpersonal relationships are characterized by pure power and rank plays and people setup then backstab each other to gain more power.
Yes because Zappos workplace does not resemble a 15th century pirate ship we need to start making comparisons to Mao who killed tens of millions of his countrymen while attempting to impose an unsupported, anti-scientific, irrational belief system he claimed was some form of Communism.
God yes, we need to worry about this and worry about this a lot.
Let's get started.
In the old-style (bureaucratic) business structure, the people at the top make like miserable for the people at the bottom.
It doesn't look like much has changed!
...first among equals.
OK - I've recently been "promoted" to a Senior Lead position in a small group. This means, in addition to the work I have been doing and continue to do, I now have to deal with the management and HR stuff for a bunch of coworkers. Even though we have a "technical career track," at this point in the track I'm expected to take on some management duties. I'm of the opinion that management by socially promoted workers isn't the way to go. Despite all the complaints from workers, first-line management is an essential function and needs to be performed by people who are good at it, period. I really am trying to make a go of it, and I consider my mandate to be something along the lines of "don't be one of the numerous idiot managers I've had in my lifetime." That said, management is a completely separate skill than just about anything technical. It's not "better," it's just "different" and therefore it shouldn't be held out as something to achieve after working as an individual contributor for X years. I think the fact that management is sometimes much better compensated than their workers leads to people ill-suited for it fighting to be promoted into it.
That said, unless you have a universally motivated workforce, the Zappos no-management thing can't work. There really are people who will do the absolute minimum to avoid getting fired. I've always been a good worker; no one would ever call me a workaholic, but I do put in extra effort consistently and have been recognized for it. It is a huge eye opener to be in the management seat and see that (a) not everyone is like this, (b) those who are not motivated need to be pushed along constantly, and (c) very little can be done to motivate said people beyond keeping their jobs. That's one of the fundamental realizations new bosses should get early on.
I agree that many companies have changed since the authoritarian style of management was the most effective everywhere. Some companies really are capable of having their staff do a good job without being helicoptered constantly. Some (law firms, consulting firms, etc.) have kept the authoritarian and up-or-out style, mainly because they only hire new graduates and indoctrinate them completely. It'll be interesting to see where this experiment ends up in the MBA case study book.
Mod parent up.
The problem is EXCESS of management personnel. Resulting in top-heavy organizations with too many layers of do-nothings between the people actually running the company and the people doing the grunt work. And with each level piled in, progressively less understanding of what's ACTUALLY going on (in both directions).
Getting rid of management COMPLETELY isn't really the answer, as workers have to then take time away from actually doing their jobs to waste time explaining about the job they should be doing if they weren't there wasting time explaining about the job they should be doing...
A good manager should have a decent idea of what the people working under him are doing, and enough loquaciousness to break it down into simpler terms for the person he/she is working for.
When you filter it through multiple levels of management the message going up eventually becomes "we are doing "stuff" right now".
Then message coming back down is "We need to keep doing "stuff" right now".
It's like trying to give a best man's speech at a wedding for a complete stranger.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
There is ALWAYS a conflict between technical interests and business interests. The business people want it done by X deadline, while the technical people want to do it right (or vice-versa, the techs want to minimize the time they spend, marketing wants sparkly "features"). Individual developers want to work on interesting problems, the business needs the product to be reliable, and needs a stupid feature implemented for a stupid client who also happens to be a big client. There are natural conflicts - there is only so much time in the day, so things have to be prioritized. The feature client X wants makes the otherwise simple, straightforward system more complex.
Someone has to make those decisions . Ultimately, most of those are BUSINESS decisions- the fact that I don't WANT to write user-documentation (and noone else does either) doesn't matter. Users need docs - it's not useful to "vote" that. So someone has to decide that documentation must be written, and since nobody WANTS to write it, someone has to assign that task. Making business decisions about how time will be spent and assigning tasks - sounds like management (aka bossing) to me.
however you could say the same with a bad manager, though the quote might be "oh god, we did it ourselves..."
unfortunately, in that case the manager can still point to the success and say "we did that!" and believe they did a good job. when the only thing they themselves did was not get in the way when conscientious employees were hired.
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled, that and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.
but perhaps surprisingly the tech organization was slowest to embrace the new idea
Why is this surprising? I assume anyone who has worked in non-trivial collaborative shit will understand the justifiable apprehension.
As you point out, someone needs to do the boring stuff. But now connect boring stuff with impacting other groups. The tax department needs to collect data that is of no use to the business, but required by the IRS. Someone in a different department needs to allocate resources to generate that data. Who manages that resource allocation?
If you think deeply enough, you will have no single direction for your outrage.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
So the traditional people manager is not necessarily the best option. I don't know if holocracy is the best option, but at least SOMEONE is trying something new. If it works, that's awesome. But to flat out say it won't work is stupid.
Also, this is just one variation of this model. Even if it doesn't work, that doesn't mean that the whole concept of a flat organization doesn't work. Most hierarchical organizations don't really work either. Most companies eventually fail. So, we have a fairly extensive history of high failure rates of so called "traditionally" managed enterprises. I think the point of any experiment like this is to learn from and adopt any good attributes and discard things that don't work for obvious reasons.
And there's the problem.
We've all had to deal with asshole bosses and it is very tempting to say "Get rid of the bosses and just let people do their jobs without interference". But, you can't have a hundred people just doing whatever they want. Somebody has to be in charge. Somebody has to be the final authority when tough decisions need to be made. Otherwise, you've just got chaos. It may work for s short time, but in the long run, it simply isn't workable.
Anyone who has any real world experience knows that management by committee just doesn't work.
But you can make a group responsible for a task, and let them figure out how to do it. If they fail to deliver, let them go.
Zappos should take a hint from the failure of the Saturn division of GM.
Looks like they should take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week.
Do you think that all the decisions of that officer should be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Yes, it is a leadership position. But i think his point still stands. It is ~just~ another position. And its not implicitly more important, or deserving of higher pay than all other positions. ...
That works in a fast food restaurant because the manager has likely been trained on every position, can train new people for those positions, can spot fill any position as needed, as well as being responsible for dealing with customer issues, providing leadership, managing supply levels, scheduling, cash management, key holder, etc. He deserves to be paid more
Several reasons why I disagree but the biggest reason is that poor management can do more damage than a poor individual contributor. You want people to aspire to this position. You want people who can do all the things that your theoretically perfect fast food restaurant manager does. In every profit center (i.e., organization that makes profit - i.e., sales, consulting) that's what I have seen... the managers are usually capable, can fill in or advise on their direct-reports' tasks, in addition to the administrative functions like budget/resource/time.
I think the biggest problem is the concept of cost centers where efficiency is measured by "minimizing costs" as opposed to "making more profit".
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
The reality is organizations need structure in order to operate. Self organizing teams are needed in many structures to deliver products and services to customers. Organizations also need managers (bosses) to evaluate employees, develop and enforce agreements between work units, and to serve as aggregators - and fire walls - to allow workers to get things done.
I've seen a few situations where this occurs "de-facto" where managers don't guide the project properly, or at all.
You can't get a bunch of software engineers off the street, put them in a room, throw the requirements spec at them and shut the door, and then come back at the contracted delivery time and expect a working system to have been produced.
There will be technical disagreement, misunderstanding of the spec, factions, bloody mindedness, not following the agreed design or interface spec (which a technical manager would normally sort out). It's ridiculous to assume that people don't need formal authoritative direction.
This is a sure-fire recipe for failure and a company will totally lose its shirt every time.
What's wrong with "design"? Palladio didn't architect buildings, he designed them.
I believe these "flat hierarchy" business models have been tried before.... It's not a brand new, amazing thing that Zappo's was the first to attempt.
That said, it's pretty uncommon because more conventional arrangements are time-tested and proven to work reasonably well. "Why change what ain't broke?", is often a prudent way to go about running a company.
Personally, I think the biggest problem companies trying it will have is making it scale well. It's relatively easy to get a good group of intelligent, motivated people together in some division of a company who start questioning the value in having a boss or bosses. They know how the get the tasks done better than anyone else, and they thrive on as little micro-management as possible. But expand that to the WHOLE company (and keep hiring enough people), and I think the whole culture risks turning "poisonous" at some point. As it is now, you see too many companies with nepotism running rampant. The bosses take turns hiring their stepbrothers, cousins, sons or daughters, etc. - instead of finding someone else who'd actually be far better for the job. Imagine what happens when everyone essentially has equal rank? A few people pull this off as a favor for family/relatives/friends and suddenly, everyone else feels they get a pass to recommend their own friends and family too. At least with a traditional structure, the project manager or mid-level manager who does this can be put in his/her place by someone above them they have to answer to -- questioning why "so and so wasn't selected despite submitting a great resume".
When there aren't single sources of responsibility then the head guy is the most important person.
He needs to get rid of 1/4 the staff and the best way is to push them out as they no longer have a job.
Why don't we just outsource management, to, say, someplace like timbuktu?
Would be a step in the right direction.
But all decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting
Seems that losing some of their talent is having a negative impact.
But the ones who are left are 'thrilled and fulfilled'.
Which is what really matters.
Who wouldn't be thrilled with 10pm work meetings and begging the CEO for a pay rise? Slavery isn't legal so this is the next best thing.
IMO that continues to conflate bossing with managing the resource. Why would the role "explaining to the suits what is possible and what isn't" benefit from having the general powers of an executive officer? If there is some sort of related decision to be made, they might actually benefit from not having anybody able to just make the decision. Then if it is something real, a group decision can be made, and if it is just somebody trying to grasp the levers of power then they can quickly get past the idea without having to go and undo it.
That said, what you describe is a workable alternate approach in many cases.
It is a type of design, sure. However, a different department, the design department, employs designers, who handle the design elements. Especially now that so many applications are web based, "design" is done by web designers. That's an entirely different job, of course, with an entirely different skill set.
What a good systems architect does is develop a robust, reliable structure and pay attention to how the different systems interact. Obviously an architect designing a building has to think about overall structural integrity. The architect also has to consider how all the different systems like elevators and main utility runs fit together. Done properly, both types of architect apply generally recognized principles to have a degree of confidence that the final structure will be sound. It's a decent analogy. (Often better than engineering*, given the way most software systems architects work).
"Architecture" also distinguishes from unstructured information systems, built ad-hoc by people with coding or IT expertise, but not systems expertise, without benefit of education in the principles of involved in making complex, growing systems continue to be reliable and easy to maintain. (Which isn't a knock on coders/programmers- I'm mostly a coder right now, as our big-picture architecture is solid, while our low-level code has room for improvement.
So yeah, it's design. But so are a lot of other things, like what you do with CSS and Photoshop. The term software architecture makes clear what you're talking about.
* There do exist a few software engineers, who apply disciplined engineering practices to software systems. Most with that job title (including me) don't really "engineer" that much, though I am learning to apply engineering- type principles and practices where I can.
Dual track has never actually worked. Sloan School has a nice report from 30-40 years ago about it. Good idea, but practically doesn't work.
Power follows money. If you control money, you have power. So if you have a dual track, and a Nobel prize winner toiling as a "individual contributor" in their lab and a 30 year old MBA directing the distribution of $10M on a parallel track, the MBA gets the higher status.
> so what's the point in not asking directly?
There are three main things my bosses have done that have made it better for me than if the CEO talked to me directly. #1, as I said I don't have time to travel to Houston to meet with the CEO, than go have meetings with the big (but dense) client and still get the coding done. Those are separate tasks, why should I have to do everything? I like designing information systems and implementing them. I don't like dealing with clients' impossible demands. Let me do my job, which I'm good at.
Secondly, the vast majority of developers can't tell you how much a project will cost. That's what the CEO needs to know. They don't CARE if it's written in C# or common Lisp, they need to know how much they need to budget for it, and decide IF they should budget for it or spend the money elsewhere. They need to know which major customers will be impacted by a change, and how much. As a coder, I don't know or care how much the client's MCR is. But it damn sure matters! I don't WANT to think about MCR and acquisition cost, I'm working on this tricky SQL transform.
Lastly, I know every little detail of the programming code and SQL for my module, which is part of a larger project to update a product, part of a product-line. I don't know or care about how important this product line is to the corporate strategy and how that affects the priorities for various projects. I -could- study the strategic plan and try to understand that better, but I'm busy with some SQL right now. Right now, I'll do the SQL and let management try to balance the priorities of different projects in light of the overall strategy.
Ps, for much of my career I've been an executive, so I CAN do all those things (but not code at the same moment). I've done it, so that's how I know that I don't want to do it right now. Right now, I want to just do some magic with this database. In a year or three I'll probably want to split my time between deeply technical stuff and mentoring younger, less experienced programmers, while setting up an environment that helps them do well (like excellent testing tools), and helping them grow by presenting them with tasks that will be challenging, but not beyond their capability. In other words, low-level management.
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power just 'cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!!
It's all the same, really.
If you have good people, you don't need managers, good people can manage themselves.
If you have good people as managers, other people won't mind working for them, because a good manager is a real contribution to the team.
If you have good people at the top level, they will bring good ideas into the company, have the resources and power to see them done, and benefit everyone.
And the reverse for bad people. In the end, it comes down to how good your people are.
That is CMM level 1. You don't want to run your organisation on that level. It's idealistic, and if it works, it works great, but it depends too much on individuals. When your company is not 20 people, but 2000, it becomes almost impossible to ensure that they are all heroes. That is when you need processes and organisational structures that, if they are made by good people(*), will act as training wheels for the less-good.
In IT we know this concept as an "expert system". Someone who is a really good manager works with someone who knows about processes and modelling to turn what he does best into a guideline for others who are not so good. The implicit knowledge gets turned into explicit knowledge. With that, you can go to CMM level 3. The higher levels are for a different discussion.
The point is: Managers are needed, because many people work better under management. Maybe nobody in the team wants to bother with resource allocation and procurement, or skill development and HR processes. Maybe nobody wants to bother with organisational tasks, or (something other posters commented) wants to make the hard decisions. There are many reasons. In the end it boils down to division of labor, which is a proven productivity enhancer.
(*) yes, you can't get rid of this dependency entirely, but you can reduce the number of good people you need. It is fairly easy to find 5 or 50 good people that set up the structure for everyone else. It is near impossible to find 500 or 5000 good people. Not because they don't exist. Because they already have jobs.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Are the levers of power bestowed in some sort of aquatic ceremony?
we don't NEED no stinking BADGES!
Don't be silly. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses.
The job of the BOD and the senior executives is to understand the big picture and long-term strategy and based on that MAKE DECISIONS FOR THE ENTIRE COMPANY about which projects to do, which projects to cancel, and the relative priority of each thing, etc. Those big-picture decisions need to be consistent throughout the organization. You don't want the development team to prioritize product XYZ while the marketing team has cancelled the marketing campaign for XYZ.
Does that make sense so far, that you don't want the graphic design team pulling overtime to design the UI for a product that the programmers have decided to cancel? To avoid that, the "liaison" TELLS the programmers "this is the product you need to build." "But we want to ..." "No, that sounds like a cool project, but the company is doing XYZ, and your part of that is to build X." A manager can be nice about it, they can be mean about it, or they can be matter-of-fact about it, but they have to tell each team what the decision is is how they are expected to contribute. If not, you won't have all the different parts done in a way that they come together to make a successful project.
I have found that most companies where managers are multi tiered and plentiful are typically run by mostly MBAs. Often these MBAs have VP titles in their name and they too are multi-tiered with SVP VP and even JVP. But the classic sign is wonderfully summed up in the movie Office Space with the TPS report. I will be dealing with some manager who will say that they are 6 months behind on their XYZ reports. I will then say, "What value do these XYZ reports have then?" Sometimes they might provide a better trail if there is a future fraud investigation or whatnot but in most cases it is just complete BS information being gathered that does not relate in any real way to the day to day operations or the company's goals.
So you will have this XYZ report that a manager is expected to spend about 1 hour per day working on. They in turn expect their underlings to spend 10+ minutes a day on the report and of course this gets passed up the chain. So a company with 5,000 employees might be effectively dedicating 50-100 employees to the XYZ report. But it isn't just a waste of time but adds stress to the employees and takes away from having a clear sense of purpose. To make it worse there might not be only one; there could also be the ABC report and the LMN training.
The way I like to boil things down is to say, OK what does this company do? Thus is removing XYZ going to impact doing that? I am often building systems for large companies and thus I am often automating the XYZ report. But suddenly I discover that not only is the XYZ report just busy work but the managers who are dedicated to it also would prefer if I would prioritize automating the XYZ report over say the billing system for selling widgets, which is what the company does. So I come back with a cost analysis that shows the value of the XYZ report is negative whereas the improved billing system will generate X extra revenue every week.
But I only do this presentation to the CEO and or board level. I would never tell the managers that the XYZ report is not needed because many of them know that their job is total BS.
One great description that I heard years ago and live by for a long time was that a good manager is there to protect their underlings from the upper management. But then I realized a greater issue. The underlings shouldn't need protection from upper management.
Management is an *activity*, not a position. U.K. and American companies seem (as a rule) to have waaaaaay more managers than needed. The best companies I've worked for had about 1 manager for every 30 to 40 individuals. I'm excited to see what Zappos can do here.
You just articulated my current experience as a contractor.
Hearing programmers say that software architects and design documents are useless is like hearing a hammer swinging construction worker say that blueprints are useless. The reality is at some point the tech-savvy people writing design documents were replaced with artists and no one preserved that critical role that needs to be filled by someone who understands both sides and the principles of sound aesthetic, interface and engineering design, let alone project management. A true software architect creates a design doc that serves both artists as well as programmers and engineers and contains the answers to every question anyone could have have. It's a document drafted by a software architect through close collaboration with informed people -- including the client/user. In short, they write a document that is informed by all teams so everyone is on the same page -- and it's in writing. They aren't working with the programmers but would be working with their team lead who speaks for them and represents their knowledge. This includes defining what goes into milestones and delivery dates and knowing what one's team is capable of despite what they say they are capable of, so padding of dates and restricting the amount of deliverables to ensure what is promised is delivered. Writing a design document usually involved no less than six weeks of thinking and talking about the software before anything more than flow diagrams, database schemas, storyboards and wireframes were produced. Usually it meant that for six weeks everyone involved was building the software in their heads and bringing up any and all issues and requirements relevent to their role and making sure it was documented for everyone before any code was written or art elements created. It also helped greatly in wiritng contracts and defining deliverables. And yeah, this role seems to evaporated from professional software development with the advent of "agile" development.