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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.
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.
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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
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.
Why do people insist on living in idealist land even when the real world clearly doesn't work that way?
How often do CEOs get their "asses kicked"?
Ridiculed, sure. Left destitute and without prospects (let alone send to jail) after driving a company into the ground and ruining the workers and investors? Rarely.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
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.
The secret to very good managers I've worked with is that they realize that the staff working under them does have more talent than the management does. 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.
Good management realizes it is their job to have all the things that the team needs in place so the team can perform at peak efficiency. They should take care of all of the logistics involved in getting the players and the equipment ready to perform. A great manager can often drive the strategy for the team, but this is not always necessary. Many great manager will just as often will employ others to provide the strategic planning.
Org charts should really be drawn in the other direction, with the highest level management at the bottom. management is there to service the organization, keep it tuned up and well oiled, keep it pruned and growing in the right direction.
The organization described in this article was of about 40 people. The tasks the former chief executives performed were analyzed and found to be tasks that could be performed by others in the organization. For an organization of professionals, experienced in their work, this seems completely reasonable and not revolutionary at all.
I've managed sizable groups (in the multi-hundreds) and I fully agree with the above. The manager's job is to enable people to get things done, to eliminate obstacles, obtain resources, and otherwise stay out of the way of the people who know how to do the work. A good manager is in some respects invisible, becoming visible only when the staff need the road cleared for them.
The biggest problem I had was with new line managers, who had to learn that being a manager wasn't about them --- it was about their staff and how they could empower their staff. Being the boss doesn't mean bossing people. As the boss you better know that you work for them because without them you fail.
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.
Like ChipsChap, I've managed teams up to the hundreds on a global scale. I've also managed global product management and strategy. I started in the trenches, as a software engineer.
Two things come to mind: first, I'll echo ChipsChap's sentiment about the manager's job. I'll add that sometimes there just needs to be someone who can make an informed decision and move forward. In many cases - in spite of what individual contributors may think - there isn't a clear-cut or definitive "better" way/solution/approach. A good manager makes decisions in the face of ambiguity, on behalf of the individual contributors, in spite of the fact that some will be pissed off.
The second thing is the unfortunate cycle I see embodied in many comments here: individual contributors have a bad boss, and declare all management stupid and decide to forge their own path as much as possible. Managers have bad individual contributors, and declare them all ineffective and in need of more management. The sports team analogy is nice because it is fairly obvious to most people that forging your own path and deciding your individuals are ineffective doesn't work.
I'll add to that, many people also misunderstand the purpose of a manager or individual contributor. Too often, ICs look expect management to be some kind of "super" version of themselves. If you're an engineer and you expect your boss to be a smarter/faster version of you, you don't understand their role (note: this is not the same as having zero understanding of a position). If you're a manager and you expect your IC to understand (or care about) the big picture or things that aren't directly in line with their day-to-day (even others' day-to-day), you don't understand their value. Case in point: I am far from the best or smartest software engineer in my company (thank goodness), but I damned well wouldn't go to one of my leads and ask them to devise a market/strategy-based feature pipeline that includes allowances for where we expect *global* legislation differences to lead the industry I'm in (and please code them up lickity-split, if you don't mind).
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?
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.