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No CEO: The Swedish Company Where Nobody Is In Charge (bbc.com)
Katie Hope, reporting for BBC: Three years ago, Swedish software consultancy Crisp decided that the answer was no. The firm, which has about 40 staff, had already trialled various organisational structures, including the more common practice of having a single leader running the company. Crisp then tried changing its chief executive annually, based on a staff vote, but eventually decided collectively that no boss was needed. Yassal Sundman, a developer at the firm, explains: "We said, 'what if we had nobody as our next CEO -- what would that look like?' And then we went through an exercise and listed down the things that the CEO does." The staff decided that many of the chief executive's responsibilities overlapped with those of the board, while other roles could be shared among other employees. "When we looked at it we had nothing left in the CEO column, and we said, 'all right, why don't we try it out?'" says Ms Sundman.
have some strange ideas.
No upper management. And no board. Now that is a scary thought. How would companies run without people in charge? We need someone there don't we? /s
I have yet to meet someone in upper management who knows more than his underlings. The reality is that most of the companies would actually run better and make more money if not for idiots in charge. Any time the boss isn't around the company things work smoother and clients are more satisfied. We even joke about it. But these are sad depressing jokes knowing you can't fire the moron who founded the company, even though it would be more successful if we did so.
Small communal companies; where everyone is in agreement on the company's focus and direction can run without senior management keeping a hand on the tiller. Once the company size grows beyond 50-60, it will either factionalize based on the differing visions for the company, implode, or strictly stay below the size where factions occur, it will grow and senior leadership/management will be needed.
Architectural plans are like computer source code with a couple of differences: You only compile once.
The article omits a critical point: that Swedish (Nordic) culture has an almost unique approach to authority that is particularly collaborative and consensual.
This model is not exportable to other contexts without a wholesale change of the destination culture as well...a bit more of an undertaking.
Cf the work by Geert Hofstede
-Styopa
I told you. We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
They looked at their C-level executives and said: hey, they don't do anything anyway, why bother.
It's a sentiment many of us have had for a long time.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
US CEOs will nuke Sweden to stop this dangerous idea from spreading around the world!
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
I'd like to see this tried at scale. 40 people barely scrapes my division.
That said, collective intelligence has been used by companies and the intelligence community. I'd be interested if a few thousand employees collective thoughts on a direction of a company would work better than the boneheaded moves by a few C-level execs.
Sounds like the White House these days.
Ask Valve
Most of the time the herd will wander around and graze peacefully, get fat, and have lots of offspring. Then comes the storm and the herd runs off a cliff wiping most of them out.
Interesting concept in a way, but leadership is not just checking boxes. Leadership is being able to react to situations and provide guidance to people to keep them no track.
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Since January, the USA is an entire country where no one is in charge.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
A CEO does two important things: one, provides a single source of vision and leadership for a company, and two, provides a great scapegoat if things aren't going in the right direction. A CEO is a lot easier to fire and replace than the whole "collective leadership body" that they have.
When things go wrong, terribly wrong, there needs to be one ass to kick. That always goes in the CEO column.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Valve is flatter than most, but it still has Big Gabe N's Big Gabe Oat Ride.
How will you ever formulate your trust synergies? without your CEO you cant reactively anticipate the growth strategy of your win-win situations and kaizan the goal strategy matrix. Christ forbid you go for longer than a few weeks without a CEO's absolutely critical newsletters and quarterly associate pow-wows to help strengthen and inspire. Why it gives me chills to think how much actual work your corporation accomplishes on a daily basis without a CEO. You might have "happy customers" and "completed projects" but do you have productivity metrics to suggest your lean six-sigma axis is tilting toward revenue pivots?
Good people go to bed earlier.
I've often thought that most CEOs could be replaced with trained chimpanzees. Plus, they'd work for peanuts.
See subject: If the employees (productive ones, not mgt.) want to make '$' they're self-motivated to do so minus a drag on payroll in usually useless mgt.!
(Most in mgt. in software development in my professional career as a software-engineer/programmer-analyst 1994-2008 now retired, are NOT coders & useless/a drag + non-productive (especially when deadline hits, they're of no practical use)).
* This is coming from ME (yes, also former mgt. no less & degreed in MIS + CS later (associates 60cr/hr LONG done, into the bachelors portion @ 90/120cr/hr)) no less.
Boards of directors (usually CEO & top shareholders) ought to realize a BIT more 'hands on' from THEIR end (less micro mgt.) overseeing reports from workers of this nature DIRECTLY rather than thru their '2nd tier' middle mgt. deadweight SAVES THEM MONEY (on payroll alone & benefits paid out to DEAD WEIGHT non-productive middle mgt.).
Of course, mid mgt. is also used to keep "familiarity breeding contempt" from happening @ a psychological angle (ala "the 'big boss' is here, be on your best behavior") - & we're all being 'played' this way all thru life, like it or not, w/ mindgames (this IS one of them - upper mgt. & CEO, & I've dealt with MANY? Just men. Not even particularly educated or skilled... just good crooks, lol!).
They're about money? THERE IS YOUR CA$H SAVINGS right there on multiple levels (pay & benefits, expense accounts etc.) shearing away middle mgt. non-productive dead-weight that's paid FAR MORE than actual production workers making the product that GETS the monies in the 1st place (not gladhander bs artists).
APK
P.S.=> The strata of society that put itself into mgt. is DEAD-AFRAID of workers realizing they're unnecessary (imo, just tattletales to boards of directors that merely execute THEIR policy, which in the end in software development once the work is done, is to SHAFT & fire the actual productive people they LEECHED ON to make said products)!
Especially on remote work from home jobs OR ones where the company has structured itself thus & yes, mid mgt. fears it!
See - engineers in general LOVE what they do & love to build something good - their NAME is on it, their craftsmanship, their rep in other words - who needs "management" dead-weight in their eyes (yes, I've been one of these guys too, they're the SALT OF THE EARTH & true productive members of society, not "mgt." overpaid windbag fake it till you make it BLOWHARD bullshitters)... apk
See subject: I run small business(es). I sheared out layers of waste by NOT depending on rental agents, plumbers, electricians, carpenters, roofers, pavers (etc. in the building trades) & FAR more (insert "X" here) that before I got 'smart', I had to waste monies on (when I was ignorant of HOW to do their jobs myself on MY own properties (necessity WAS the "mother of invention" for me, it cost BIG monies - I had to eliminate them to survive)).
* Does it work? Yes! I'm LIVING proof you can do it sucessfully in a business OF YOUR OWN!
E.G.-> I've been able to retire SUCCESSFULLY (& only work consulting here & there IF a project pays right + interests me technically so I keep motivated (money isn't enough imo)) - that good enough/work for you?
Does for me!
(I'm by NO means "rich"/"wealthy" but bills get paid, food is on the table, those whom I care for are taken care of w/ a 'wee bit' set aside for 'emergencies'... if I need more? I go out & 'hustle it' contracting/consulting!)
APK
P.S.=> Best of all - my TIME & LIFE is my OWN again - & that IS what you're selling in SUBMISSION as a WAGESLAVE being paid peanuts of the TRUE amount of potential profits (selling your YOUTH & HEALTH away) - yes, most have to start out this way, but I was told this in academia during my MIS degreework in the 80's by instructors: SMALL BUSINESS IS THE WAY OF THE FUTURE (a freer BETTER future, trick is getting there minus being indebted to banks, biggest crooks of all))... apk
They rarely actually do it, but it remains an essential function of the office, and I'm sure they'll feel a need for it at some point.
By virtue of being nominally responsible for anything the company does, the CEO serves as somebody to blame when shit goes wrong. Other people get blamed more often in practice, but this is because one of a CEO's other main functions is delegating.
Without a CEO, how will we ever be able to make sure that corporate assets are sold off to third parties and then leased back in order to show a huge short-term profit that generates a huge year-end bonus while simultaneously stripping the company of value and driving it toward bankruptcy?
... and is happy that he's doing regular consulting again. Big decisions are made at all-hands meetings that are made 3x a year. ... It actually sounds pretty unspectacular and really not that far from what I would do if I had a company.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I'd even take that over Trump.
They looked at their C-level executives and said: hey, they don't do anything anyway, why bother.
Which is not all surprising given the business the company was in. When most of the employees are working at customer sites doing customers' bidding, the company structure isn't doing much. I don't know the details of how this particular Swedish company, but many consultancies here operate as little more than recruiting agencies. They hire and fire based on customer needs. They provide no internal training. The only people who come into the office on a regular basis are those that seek customers and those that recruit employees to meet that demand. With a total head count of forty, there might be only three or four people who truly work there and almost nothing that needs to be decided quickly has company wide effect. Those handful probably operate by consensus most of the time anyway. What's the point of a CEO?
I have managed teams from 3 to 50, and I agree with you completely.
The real problem comes in when the manager's manager has different ideas. It's so much harder to be a good manager if your manager is not.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I have yet to meet someone in upper management who knows more than his underlings.
Right... All those upper management people got there by being know-nothing idiots... [/sarcasm]
Yes you probably know more about your specific job than anyone else does. Guess what? The same is usually true for everyone in the company including management. And people don't generally get to management jobs without having a pretty good clue how things work. Management doesn't need to know every nuanced detail about how to do everything in the company. That's why they hire other people. It doesn't mean they are clueless, it means they don't have the time to do everything themselves and/or that they can hire someone who is better at a given task then they are.
Basically a smart manager hires people who are smarter than they are whenever possible. The guy in charge doesn't have to be the smartest guy in the room at all times. He just has to be the guy who can figure out who the smartest guy is for a given task (or the most economical person) and take obstacles out of their way. I have a staff of about a dozen people that report to me. For the most part I try to let them do their job without me bothering them. In some cases I actually can do their job better than they can but it would stupid of me to try because I don't have the time. That was why I hired them - I needed the help. In other cases they do their job better than I can so my job is simply to make sure they aren't interfered with. That was also why I hired them - they are better than me at those tasks. Nobody is an expert in everything and it's foolish to expect them to be.
The reality is that most of the companies would actually run better and make more money if not for idiots in charge.
You can say that about every job. Your company would do better if you were better at your job too. My company would be better if I were better at my job. That is always true in every job.
Any time the boss isn't around the company things work smoother and clients are more satisfied.
Sounds like you should be polishing your resume if your management is so incompetent.
We should stop having corporations and jobs and stop working for money too.
Like most alt-right posts on "those crazy Europeans" I suspect something was lost in translation.
Like a sports team, the manager of the team can rarely accomplish what the athletes can. The manager may have been a great athlete in their past, but usually they were not.
And few of the athletes can accomplish what the manager can if he's decent at his job. That works both ways. Different skill sets are required for both jobs. Management rarely gets to their position by being incompetent know-nothings. They got that job because they have specific skills just like every other team member. It's not that the manager is less talented than his team, it's that he has a different set of talents to bring to the table. Each team member focuses on their role and the whole thing works. The role of the manager is to remove obstacles and keep all the parts of the team coordinated and on task.
It's essentially what USA goes through right now.
The US of A "would actually run better and make more money if not for idiots [Trump c.s.] in charge".
The one thing most managers fail to understand that most people if given a goal and all the things they need to accomplish that goal will work steadily toward it.
Many people are like that but not all. If you've managed groups of people you would know that for every motivated and hard working person out there there is a malingerer who wants a paycheck but doesn't really want to do any work. I can't put numbers to it beyond saying that the percent of the population that will be lazy and uncaring given the chance is in double digit percentages. This is particularly true if the job that needs to be done is boring, hard, dirty, or tiring.
I don't know if you've had the pleasure of dealing with fraudulent worker's comp claims. I have. You'd be amazed the lengths to which some people will go to avoid work. Many more don't take it that far but there are plenty more who do just enough to get by. Just because you make a goal doesn't mean everybody is going to be inspired by it. I've had to fire plenty of people who would much rather watch youtube videos on their phone than do their job. Maybe that means I'm not the best manager but more likely it just means that those were people who really just don't care.
If you have to drive them something is very wrong.
Not necessarily. Let's take McDonalds for example. I think we'd agree that it is a successful business. I think we'd also agree that it's not the most pleasant place to work. Pay is low, the work is tiring and boring, and your co-workers are rarely bright and motivated. Goals? Most of the workers don't care much about the goals of the company. Turnover in that company is over 100% per year. And yet they are very successful despite having a largely unmotivated workforce that turns over constantly. The people that work there want a paycheck and they harness that, deal with it, and drive their workforce to do what is needed. For the most part your typical McDonalds worker doesn't give a shit about any goal you put in front of them. They are there out of necessity and are not true believers. And that's ok as long as you know what to expect from them and build the business accordingly.
That's definitely true, but the unfortunate reality is that *someone* needs to be in charge, and the US has gotten extremely bad about picking its leaders. It's not just Trump either: it's Congress too. Replacing Trump wouldn't fix the US's problems by a long-shot, because any president still has to deal with our crappy Congress. I honestly don't see any way to fix this. The American people have proven now that they're utterly incapable of choosing good leaders at the federal level.
I wish MBAs were judged by their ability to support and enable coworkers to achieve a common goal.
That sentence is a non-sequitur. A MBA is a college degree, not a class of people. Having a MBA doesn't grant anyone magical armor to prevent their job performance critically evaluated.
Presumably you are using MBA as a trite shorthand for someone in management who studied business in college. Guess what? They ARE judged on their ability to do exactly what you suggest. Managers who fail to support and enable co-workers to do their job generally suck at their job and generally are rewarded accordingly no different than any other job. Having an engineering degree doesn't grant one magical powers of intelligence and competence nor does it mean they are good at engineering. Some people with MBA diplomas are very good at their job. A bunch more are mediocre and some really suck. Same as with any other type of degree and job.
They already have a board, what more is required? CEOs are generally just people looking for power over other people and they're not important to a company.
While this is true, the reality is that the person's co-workers are quite capable of spotting this without any manager's help. If they are empowered to do something about it, they can.
Yes, so have I. I've also seen companies that go out of their way to duck valid worker's comp claims. Either way, this isn't a task for group managers to deal with. Worker's comp, at least in IT, is about the health and welfare of the individual. The essence of management, as typically constituted, is to steer the group in the direction of the desired goals. Health and welfare really ought to be dealt with elsewhere in the structure than the group management (assuming that management is actually required, which may or may not be the case, depending on many factors.)
No, it's not okay. It's almost a perfect example of worker exploitation. They should be paid enough and work allocated in such a way as to make the job a pleasure to do. By low-balling benefits, pay and tasking, providing no reasonable breaks, and seeing to it that there is very little opportunity or reason to dedicate one's self to doing a good job, management inherently takes on the role of exploiter in order to make things work "anyway." And it shows -- how may times have customers seen the patty slopped halfway onto the bun, the condiments in a ridiculous pile on some small fraction of the patty, the orders missing something or containing something that wasn't ordered? That's a direct consequence of making people suffer in their jobs. Not of the job being inherently difficult.
Now, you can (and many do) argue that in order to keep that hamburger at a dollar, you have to exploit the workforce. The problem, as I see it, is that large numbers of citizens are earning so little as to make it so that an increase of a few dollars a day in meal costs represent a significant, even critical, impact on their overall income. This, while McDonald's executives earn millions of dollars per year.
We are never going to fix this unless we restrict the highly unbalanced upwards flow of money into the hands of those who hold the controlling reins of these organizations. In other words, owners, CEOs and yes, managers. This will probably happen, but only because these upscale jobs will be automated out of existence. Otherwise, greed, hubris and a blatant disregard for worker welfare will continue to make jobs such as fast food jobs your basic employee's nightmare.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Well to be honest this only happened in Stockholm and was not called Feminist Snow Plowing but Equal Snow Plowing in which walking- and bike-lanes as well as roads used by the public transport where prioritized over car roads. And the blog that you link to is kind of fake news because the snow chaos that happened in Stockholm was not due to this new prioritizing but that there came more snow than anticipated so the people in charge of the plowing where slow to start.
The board is still in charge. And below, there is a top level of management.
They eliminated one middle man between the top managers and the board. Big deal.
In America, that is one seriously overpaid middle man, however, so we need to do it more than they do.
---
According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
I'm no longer primarily a software-engineer/programmer-analyst wageslave working for others. My monies work for me now. I'm into something completely different if you aren't intelligent enough to gather that from what I wrote (but then nobody accused you of being literate or intelligent) where that is possible.
* Coding was just a stepping stone to it...
APK
P.S.=> However, I still do my share of coding & yes, on hosts files since they give you more speed, security, reliability + anonymity online doing more for less from faster kernelmode as a native part of the IP stack itself (& I do well @ it when reviews I get from others here, even mmell whom I "had it out" with a few times, do me right as he did here https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10255867&cid=53882945/ (other /ers are giving me the same too https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10255867&cid=53886247/ & https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10255867&cid=53886281/
FACT: It's OBVIOUS you WISH you had the skills to be able to do that but all you do is be a trolling online pest - grow up, do something useful with your otherwise obviously WASTED LIFE... ok? apk
...so who's going to lead your "flying the corporate jet to each remote site to give a 2 hour-long all-hands presentation on how everyone needs to cut expenses and increase productivity" effort now?
In a previous life I worked for Ericsson. In training for Americans, a story was related by our Swedish trainer as so: "The Roman empire finally came knocking on the borders of what's now Sweden and asked of some Swedes, "take us to your leader" in typical Roman fashion. The startled Swedes responded, "what's that?" Anyone who ever worked for a Swedish company would recognize the idea of a *very* flat organization where the ratio of compensation between the top and bottom employees is around 4:1 - contrast that to the average American company of around 400:1.
As if any of the selected alternatives to Trump were any better?
See: http://dna.crisp.se if you are truly interested.
The interview barely scratched the surface.
Love reading the comments.
--A Crisper
Don't misrepresent my statements, if you want clarity ask. There have been 0 successful democracies because major problems can not be solved. Problems in many cases are not even recognized because problems are always someone else' problem. If they are recognized, by the time everyone can agree on a solution it's too late. The longest lasting pure democracy didn't make it a full generation.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Atlas Shrugged
There is a lot of misunderstanding out there about what a CEO's job is (among CEOs, even).
Done properly, a CEO is not "the boss," but simply the primary interface between investors (board of directors) and management (the people actually running the company). Often, a CEO will take on more of an investor or manager role depending on the size of the company and the quirks of the individuals involved. This can lead to trouble though. Knowing who to support and when in the perennial struggle between management and investors is the key to being a good CEO.
I think the idea of the individual CEO as successful benevolent dictator is a myth. You may know some famous CEOs who seem like supermen (i.e. Musk, Gates, Jobs), but there are always teams of people with more power and authority in their companies that provide vision, execution, discipline, financing... whatever is lacking.
The company from TFA is employee owned and focused on providing consulting services. In that situation, not having a CEO makes sense. All of the employees are manager/investors and have very similar goals for the company. They're not growth oriented or VC backed. Why have a CEO?
So the Americans elected one.
where the more capable are expected to manage the others for equal pay and no explicit authority to manage.