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No CEO: The Swedish Company Where Nobody Is In Charge (bbc.com)

Posted by msmash on from the taking-a-different-approach dept.

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.

3 of 181 comments (clear)

  1. Won't work everywhere, or really anywhere else by argStyopa · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  2. Scale? by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Scale? by olau · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Look up Semco and Ricardo Semler:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

      Semco has > 3000 people.

      If you are curious, try reading this book:

      https://www.amazon.com/Seven-D...

      The title is cheesy, but it really is an interesting book, once you get into it. Semler's philosophy is that of questioning things and if no good answers are provided, experiment with changing it.

      For instance, he describes how he wanted to let people themselves choose the executive which ended up with him being replaced. :)

      Or another experiment where he thought it was silly that the company should dictate the working hours in their factory. He then had to fight the union who thought he was tricking them, until they the finally agreed to a carefully controlled experiment - in the end the workers just held a short meeting the day before and decided among themselves what do to.

      Of course, some kind of coordination structure is still needed. But there's a difference between CEO-is-coordinator to CEO-is-tyrant-who-can-fire-you-on-the-spot-if-he-doesn't-like-your-dress.

      People will self-organize, and self-organization is powerful because it lets those with the dirty fingers make adjustments that are obvious to them.