
Zappos’ experiment to end the office workplace - cjdulberger
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122965/can-billion-dollar-corporation-zappos-be-self-organized
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blazespin
Work life integration... Shudder. I like 6 hours a day of ruthless,
compartmentalized efficiency (think mental sprinting) and after that, forget
about it. Only if you give me significant equity in a rapidly growing company
will i do work life integration.

Interesting quote "When the deadline arrived on the last day of April, 14
percent of the company, 210 people, took the offer. Twenty of them were
managers, I was told, out of a total of 246. It was a difficult day. Tear-
stained faces replaced the typical smiles on the Zappos campus." People want
to be managed!

~~~
VLM
> People want to be managed!

I would interpret that somewhat differently, I'd take the offer, for example.

A long time ago as a high school student I stacked bags of sidewalk salt on
pallets. The only thing keeping me out of toilet plunging, manual labor, and
being yelled at by customers over the phone is my job title / position so
eliminating them has very little appeal to me. If I was at the bottom of the
hierarchy, sure, elimination of the hierarchy sounds great; but in the
middle/top of a technical hierarchy... elimination doesn't sound so great.

I also expect to live a couple more years, and I have children relying on me
to put food on the table, pay for schooling and health care, etc. Plus lets
face it, I have no great desire to live under a freeway overpass myself. How
do I explain at my next job interview that two jobs ago I was more or less a
software dev but my most recent job title was ninja, but I'm just as good as
the other 9 out of 10 applicants you have who were software devs in their most
recent job. Sure you were, sure you were (insert sound of resume hitting trash
can)

Another interesting interpretation is its like joining a cult. Self
depreciation of myself and my career combined with permanently removing myself
from the greater employable economy... So they're passing around the kool
aide, smells kinda like almonds, eh, I think I'll pass, this is finally one
step too far.

~~~
mattlutze
We don't do titles so much where I work. As far as my boss is concerned, we
call ourselves what we like. I think whatever official HR system of record we
have, I'm probably listed as Technical Analyst III or something, even though
for the last 3 or so years I've been a Software Developer or Team Lead or
Product Manager, depending on the client or email. Which is what I'll call
myself on my resume the next time I have to go out job hunting. I'm not sure I
see anything untoward in it, though someone correct me if I'm wrong. Official
Titles are for payroll systems, your title should describe what you do or what
you did.

Which is a bunch of words to say were I a Zappos Ninja that was actually a
software dev, I'd write Software Developer on my resume and tell a joke about
how cool my TCL nunchaku skills are now.

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mattlutze
_" People who live in trailers,” he said darkly, “generally do so because
they're broke, not because it's a fun social experiment."_

This quote closer to the end of the piece struck a cord with me. Part of
leadership is the responsibility to provide a level of stability or
predictability. I can see how these changes might really not fly or be
comfortable for a lot of the staff that don't have the luxury of being on the
buyer's side of their job market.

Boredom in the boardroom is no reason to add stress to your employee
community's work life.

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kriro
This reads like a bizzaro nightmare of a workplace for introverts. Seems like
a bad long term strategy to be this "peoply" (and make it an uncomfortable
place for a good chunk of the workforce).

~~~
Joeri
If you read the book mentioned in the article it is not quite so brainwashy. I
expect it doesn't make sense for a majority of workplaces as is, but it didn't
sound like teal workplaces where bad places to work. In fact, it sounded like
the sort of place I would love to work, but at the same time I knew that the
majority of my coworkers would not fit in. The basic tenet as I understood it
is that you can replace the structure of management with a structure of
decision-making processes where decisions are taken at the lowest possible
rung (where lowest means as close as possible to the work the decision
impacts). It's not democracy, but it is self organized. It's a book worth
reading if you want to reset your expectations on what corporate hierarchy
must look like.

From the article I didn't get the sense zappos is doing it right though.
People aren't supposed to be afraid to speak up.

~~~
cableshaft
You can still have the titles and have meetings where those with a 'lower'
title can have input on decisions if you foster a culture where that is
commonplace.

I once worked for a company that had managers, etc, but the president would
call in the developers and designers and artists regularly for a project
meeting if they were involved and the devs/designers/artists could (and did)
speak up about how feasible things were, how long they thought it would take
them, and how they thought it could be better. It was a mostly flat hierarchy
(basically devs -> one layer of leads/managers -> president), but it did
exist.

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boothead
I have read "the book" mentioned (Reinventing Organizations) and it's amazing.
Another book to read would be Maverick by Ricardo Semler. The companies
covered, from a wide range of different sectors, industries and countries
genuinely seems to provide a nurturing, egalitarian environment for their
employees. I think that operating from a teal perspective would make the world
a better place.

However I note in the book that most organizations covered had a visionary
leader who at some point stepped back and allowed the company to become what
it did. Essentially embracing chaos and allowing the culture to emerge. Tony
seems to be trying to impose this evolution from above, which I'm less sure
about. (At least this is how it seems many of the zappos employees feel about
it).

I would love to hear anyone's experience who is working for a company that's
embraced holocracy.

~~~
veritas3241
I loved "Reinventing Organizations" as well. It's interesting because some of
the Teal ways of doing things rubbed me the wrong way because they felt too
"touchy-feely" and I thought that my coworker would never go for this. I tried
to have enough self-awareness to realize that maybe that's how people stuck in
the Orange way of doing things feel about Green practices. Like you, I would
love to hear from people who are working in a Teal environment.

If you're interested in other books that talk about the future of work I would
recommend Creativity, Inc by Ed Catmull (about how Pixar works) and Work
Rules! by Laszlo Bock (about how Google HR works). They're both fascinating
insights into how two modern companies try to do their best work.

Would love some recommendations if you have any as well.

~~~
boothead
One recommendation from a perhaps unexpected quarter for new working styles is
Gen. Stan McChrystal's superb book "Team of Teams". It covers his tenure
running special forces in Iraq and how he rebuilt his organization into one
where decisions were pushed as far to the edges as possible and how he tried
to remove himself from as many of the decision making loops as possible.

~~~
jaggederest
The military is big on OODA and accelerating the speed of decisionmaking.

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ThinkBeat
It is an interesting look at how Zappos now organizes their privileged / upper
class employees.

However the employees who do most of the work, toil away in warehouses, under
the control of Amazon and their soul crushing timelines.

~~~
jinushaun
Zappos sounds like a dystopia to me. It's well-off white-collar workers (i.e.,
leisure class) who depressingly keep trying to optimise their
workflow/happiness--like an addict chasing the next high. It's the top part of
the Maslow's Hierarchy of Need.

This experiment is only possible because Zappos is a stable money-making
business and the CEO can afford the "risk" of failure due to personal
financial security. How about experiment on improving the lives of the lower
class, instead of the upper class? If this philosophy is the pinnacle of
working human society, then why limit it to only a select few? I guess the
warehouse workers will all be replaced by robots anyway, so they'll be someone
else's problem after that.

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WorldMaker
So the objective is to humanize the corporation but the solutions they've
wound up at are essentially gamification (points, badges). I wouldn't
necessarily call gamification a humanization: it seems more like a tangent to
a different rabbit hole. Instead of HR Policies that try to come from a human
place you get "game systems" that become just as stressful to "play" if not
more so...

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headShrinker
People thought "the office" was funny for the way the characters handled
situations with complete ineptitude and their inability to understand
conventional norms. I think they should make a TV show based on people trying
to handle architecture of Teal. The way it's being described, it sounds like
another world; and just as hard to comprehend. Monkeys, ninjas, roles, badges,
and the beach...

~~~
itsybitsycoder
The little trailer park for employees sounds like it would make a great set
for a TV sitcom. Instead of meeting up at Central Perk they can sit on their
individual tiny house porches and talk to each other.

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infecto
Does anyone know why Amazon mandated they migrate the platform to Amazon? This
multiyear project appears to be a sinkhole to me. Multiple years where very
little changes in your company except for a backend migration to Amazons
platform. Whats the value add? Would it not be less costly to keep the system
and create a migration to any necessary systems?

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thewarrior
Like someone on Twitter said this reads like some Douglas Adams novel.

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ommunist
Well, never heard of anything like that in climates with serious winter. Any
boss-free examples from Sweden, Finland or Norway?

~~~
dagw
Based on my experience working in both Norway and Sweden, bosses here are far
more hands off and egalitarian than most of the horror stories I hear from the
US. There just doesn't seem to be the same Us vs. Them feeling, so there
doesn't seem to a big anti-boss anti-management movement here to begin with
(although I'm sure lots of people will pipe up with personal counter
examples).

In fact the only really annoying micro-managing boss I ever had was a guy from
California.

~~~
ommunist
You are not talking about St Jobs, right?

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tommccabe
_The company encourages its 600 CLT representatives to make personal
connections with callers, and to send flowers, cookies, or thank-you cards._

curious, do they encourage this on the company dime or is the CLT expected to
pay out of pocket for these 'personal connections'?

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flavor8
> Supercloud has about 20 different teams, with 250 to 350 people, including
> contractors, working with more than 100 different Amazon teams.

I'm interested in this aspect. Why is the migration so complex? It's an
ecommerce store that sells shoes. What gives?

~~~
jeffclark
Complete guess on possible engineering teams that could make up that 250-350
people: SEO/acquisition, various "admin"/marketplace functionalities (adding,
removing, updating products), analytics, financial reporting, marketing
reporting, payment processing, probably some kind of "core" team, general
bugs/RTB, etc etc etc etc.

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pm24601
How is career development and mentoring going to be handled?

Good managers aren't just bosses, they provide mentorship and help break
through and across organizations. Not everyone is emotionally equipped to do
the intra-organizational networking.

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richardboegli
I haven't RTFA yet, just skimmed a few comments. How does this different from
Valve's setup of not having any bosses?

[http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...](http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf)

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nasalgoat
The idea of having to invent badges to describe my job and justify my salary
sends shivers up my spine.

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dharma1
did it work?

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bru_
I'm going to work at Zappos and do magic mushrooms all the time, refuse to
wear shoes or change out of a wardrobe solely comprised of yak fur, and
develop myself into the most central node on the org chart by generally being
the chillest, most non reductionist dude in the organization

~~~
abledon
As long as you write good unit tests I'm sure you'll be fine ;)

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timdiggerm
Oh good, another article about Zappos

