
How Medium Is Building a New Kind of Company with No Managers - yarapavan
http://firstround.com/article/how-medium-is-building-a-new-kind-of-company-with-no-managers
======
ceejayoz
I tend to think of this approach as "a company that hasn't had a big HR
incident yet".

~~~
Agustus
One lawsuit from an sexual harassment will end this free for all.

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lisa_henderson
As Jo Freeman once said:

"Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a
structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes
together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure
itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time;
it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the
members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities,
personalities, or intentions of the people involved. The very fact that we are
individuals, with different talents, predispositions, and backgrounds makes
this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any basis
whatsoever could we approximate structurelessness -- and that is not the
nature of a human group. This means that to strive for a structureless group
is as useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an "objective" news story,
"value-free" social science, or a "free" economy. A "laissez faire" group is
about as realistic as a "laissez faire" society; the idea becomes a
smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony
over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of
"structurelessness" does not prevent the formation of informal structures,
only formal ones. Similarly "laissez faire" philosophy did not prevent the
economically powerful from establishing control over wages, prices, and
distribution of goods; it only prevented the government from doing so. Thus
structurelessness becomes a way of masking power, and within the women's
movement is usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful
(whether they are conscious of their power or not). As long as the structure
of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only
to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules. Those
who do not know the rules and are not chosen for initiation must remain in
confusion, or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of
which they are not quite aware."

Her comments were aimed at the feminist movement of the 1970s, but her essay
is universal and everyone can gain from reading it:

The Tyranny Of Structurelessness

[http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm](http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm)

------
untog
I don't quite buy it. I'll guarantee that there are figures who call the shots
in the company, whether they are called "managers" or not.

~~~
skorecky
Did you read beyond the headline? Pulled from the article he talks about this
and pin points two ideas behind making decisions:

1\. "Make everything explicit — from vacation policies to decision makers in
each area."

2\. "Distribute decision-making power and discourage consensus seeking."

~~~
mc32
Could you refine point two more?

I don't understand how you distribute decision making without consensus? In
that scenario "leader" types would make the decisions for the group, right?
And then it's not "distributed".

I guess I don't understand that point.

~~~
pc2g4d
My take was that "distribute" means everybody has some sort of decision making
power, and the power to make all the decisions is not concentrated in
hierarchical fashion. Those who wield the power to make a particular decision
are then encouraged to make the decision themselves without garnering a
consensus first.

~~~
mc32
Ah, that makes sense.

I have not worked under such a power structure, so I can't speak from
experience. What I would wonder is how does one know where the power lies? It
can more or less become invisible.

I gather it could become somewhat tribal --where while perhaps there are no
titles power does reside somewhere. So here bad things are one's fault rather
than say a boss's fault. How can you even vent? At least in set hierarchies
you know who to blame. you know who the bad decision makers are you know who
the asses are. But in this kind of structure it all more or less hidden but
decisions are devolved and distributed.

I'm not sure I like the shadowy aspect of this structure. Then again, I
haven't formally experienced it --except for informal groups and there you get
cliques.

------
nasalgoat
The key takeaway from the article is that Medium is still under 50 people. At
that size, any sort of hokum management style will probably work.

Call me when you hit 200+.

~~~
balls187
Gabe Newell is on line 3.

Valve is famous for their flat organizational structure. At nearly 200 people
and multi-billions in revenue, it can work.

Ofc Valve does a lot more than a simple blog site.

~~~
potatolicious
Valve has also been called out by former employees for not being actually
structureless. They don't have an official org chart, but there's an
unofficial one at work anyways.

Any sufficient large group of people will self-organize into hierarchies. A
refusal to write it down doesn't prevent this from happening, it just means
people are even less accountable for the position they occupy.

"We believe in flatness" usually is code for "we believe in the appearance of
flatness".

~~~
kyllo
Ok, so this debate seems to be framed in terms of authoritarian bureaucracy
vs. anarchy.

But what about corporate governance that has formal structure and rules, but
is governed in a democratic rather than authoritarian fashion?

There are more than two dimensions to this. Structure does not necessitate
top-down command, and vice versa.

~~~
j_baker
You're talking about "participatory management". It was a fad in the 50s that
comes up again from time to time. It sounds like a good idea, but it actually
ends up _increasing_ bureaucracy. There's a good article that discusses
exactly what you're talking about here:

[http://www.maccoby.com/CHeckscher/Articles/LimitsPartMgmt.sh...](http://www.maccoby.com/CHeckscher/Articles/LimitsPartMgmt.shtml)

~~~
kyllo
That essay is hilarious, it explains all these failures of companies doing
participatory management half-assed, provides a few successful counterexamples
of companies/divisions/plants that did it full-assed, and then concludes that
the failures failed because they didn't take the changes far enough.

------
frandroid
Supplemental reading: THE TYRANNY of STRUCTURELESSNESS
[http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm](http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm)

------
anateus
Several comments on the thread seem to not have read the article.
Specifically: while they do not have "traditional people managers", they have
people they call "Lead Links" and "Domain Leads" who take on management roles.

It seems many are reading the title of the article and imagining a utopian
experiment in total anarchy.

~~~
Iftheshoefits
Giving managers titles that don't have the word "manager" in them doesn't mean
that there aren't managers. Describing their responsibilities as being
"mentor"-like rather than "managerial" doesn't mean they aren't, in fact,
managing.

The headline is rather explicitly stating that Medium is building a company
with "no managers," and then the article goes on to describe some rather
transparently bad attempts at euphemistically calling "managers" something
other than "manager." I think the commenters you're referring to can be
forgiven because of that.

~~~
rouxbot
The article doesn't do a great job conveying how Medium is actually
structured. I can only speak to how it was a year and a half ago (when I
left), but the difference between a system like Holacracy and a standard
hierarchical organization is that a person in Holacracy might hold roles in
many circles at the same time and those roles are relatively fluid.

The whole point in a role is to define who has decision-making authority over
some given thing and/or what that role is responsible for. Lead links come
about when a role becomes too big for a single person and turns into a circle
which has its own members. The lead link is there to represent the circle to
the parent circle and to determine who is filling what roles. Other than that,
the circle is largely self governing (roles, responsibilities, etc are all
decided in regular governance meetings as a circle, not by the lead link).

There are definitely decision makers at the company, but they're not managing
people per se, they just have authority over some area of the company. The
whole people side is entirely independent and generally lives outside of
Holacracy.

~~~
Iftheshoefits
What you've described is a manager/supervisor->director->VP->SVP/C-Suite
chain, but with different terms, (possibly) shorter tenure, and with a perhaps
slightly more democratic allocation procedure.

It's a management structure, just billed as something else.

~~~
rouxbot
Management of work, not management of people, that's the key thing. Yes
there's a hierarchy of responsibilities, but individual people live many
places in that hierarchy which is what makes it different.

------
spiritplumber
How is this new? We've been doing that since 2011.

[http://robots-
everywhere.com/re_wiki/index.php?n=Main.MeshMa...](http://robots-
everywhere.com/re_wiki/index.php?n=Main.MeshManagement)

(I know this was just put on the wiki, that's because we're revamping it. I
have gmail timestamps if you like).

I'm getting sick and tired of seeing in the news stuff that I've been doing
for years, even told the relevant press outlets about, and getting crickets in
return!

~~~
skorecky
For one, it's new for them. Secondly, just because you been doing it since
2011 doesn't mean people don't like reading about how others are doing it.
Where is your blog post?

~~~
rouxbot
Not new actually, Medium started with Holacracy either in late 2011 or early
2012. This article is about a year and a half old...

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j_baker
The idea of holacracy is interesting to me, but something tells me it's more
about marketing than anything else. Holacracy seems to do the exact opposite
of getting rid of managers. It's actually making everyone a manager of
something.

And yet, it's billed as simply being a way of getting rid of managers. If
that's all there is to Holacracy, then the entire idea is pointless. Reducing
the layers of management is a means not an end.

Reductionism FTW.

------
jayvanguard
Everyone who starts a company in their twenties thinks they are re-inventing
the office environment (I know, I did it too). It turns out, your company is
just small, it is in a cool industry where people are well paid, and if you
step back you probably have very little diversity in your office. Everyone
looks just like you. Not the most challenging human organizational structure
to manage.

~~~
mkirlin
"It's crazy how, in our company that's entirely white dudes in their mid to
late 20s, we don't really have many issues with sexual harassment, ageism, or
racism. We've moved beyond those concerns!"

------
skyshine
What I want to know is how do they make the difficult decisions.

When does someone get fired?

If there are not enough resources in the pot, then who gets to expand?

------
balls187
> He started spending one-on-one meetings talking to his reports about their
> lives, instead of their tasks, and productivity shot through the roof

Google famously published a study that said essentially the best managers were
the ones who took active interest in their peoples lives.

For me, unless they are behavior/performance related, my 1:1's are always
"their" time. Time for the employee to talk about whatever. That said, most of
them feel like talking about work.

------
mkirlin
Valve always gets brought up as an example of a flat structure that works (and
it already has been in this thread). Here's an interview with a former Valve
hardware engineer describing how the system works in practice:
[http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/195786/ExValve_hardware_e...](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/195786/ExValve_hardware_expert_shares_uncommon_look_inside_the_company.php).
She likened the experience to high school, in terms of cliques that developed
(which is about what you would expect). Her entire team got fired by Gabe
Newell, which I kinda feel should answer any questions you have about whether
there's actually a boss - whoever can tell you that you don't have a job
tomorrow is in fact your boss, even if they don't want to acknowledge it. She
agrees with what a lot of people have already said, that this works in small
groups, but that it doesn't scale well.

Honestly, it sounded like a pretty crappy place to work, although she freely
admits that she was bitter, and that it's very much a case of a disillusioned
zealot. I've enjoyed working with most of the bosses I've had, and I've always
thought that it's nice to have people who give you direction and quality
feedback. I've had some really terrible bosses too, but the idea that since
there are some bad bosses we should throw out the whole structure of
management seems like a big over-reaction.

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matthewrhoden1
Is this going to be the next open office concept?

------
zem
i'm not saying this kind of company cannot work, but i would like to see
people doing it explicitly address the points in "the tyranny of
structurelessness"

[http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm](http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm)

------
Cyranix
I'm not seeing a lot of comments describing first-hand experience with a
holacratic system, so I'll jump in.

I was a developer at Moveline (which shuttered, sadly, this past December).
Around the start of 2014, the company adopted holacracy as its organizational
model; while there were certainly other valid reasons to do so, but I know
that it was in part motivated by the fact that another Las Vegas-based
company, Zappos, was also an adherent. Over the course of the year, in
addition to writing code, I also served as the elected secretary for the dev
team and facilitator of the GCC (General Company Circle; top-most level of the
hierarchy), attended holacracy training courses, and coached people throughout
the company about the mechanics of holacracy and how to make it work for them.
Suffice it to say, I was pretty immersed, so I feel like I can represent how
things played out at Moveline fairly accurately.

The up-front costs associated with shifting from a traditional structure to
any other structure can be pretty massive; holacracy is no exception to that
rule. Bigwigs from the official holacracy company (HolacracyOne) came onsite
to give talks and run the first several meetings, which cost a decent chunk of
change as well as taking time out of a busy startup's day. Teams and roles
needed to be defined using the terminology and mechanics of holacracy. There
were impacts here and there to scheduling, to communication systems, and to
getting things done in general. Eventually, however, the ramp-up phase ended
and we were able to experience holacracy in full.

As you might expect, there were established figures in the company who felt
strong resistance to holacracy. Some of them held significant managerial power
before the transition; others wanted a flatter, less formal approach. Those
tensions came up fairly frequently in meetings and other conversations, and it
created an atmosphere of not being quite satisfied with how things were being
run (not that these people should have stifled their opinions, mind you). This
problem was compounded when we entered a major growth phase, going from under
40 employees to over 100 in the span of a few months. New hires were
unfamiliar with holacracy, necessitating additional training, but just as
importantly they entered an environment where low-grade dissatisfaction with
holacracy was palpable. If there's a lesson here, it's that adopting holacracy
requires far more buy-in than you might expect. (For what it's worth, I'm not
aware that anyone ever felt unable to voice their dissatisfaction at Moveline;
we had a culture of open and honest talk, but identifying an issue isn't the
same as solving it.)

A natural question to ask at this point is "What about backing out of
holacracy?", to which I'd reply that it's easier said than done. Since a not-
insignificant amount of effort goes into the initial setup, it's easy to fall
prey to the sunk cost fallacy. The rationalization is reinforced by
HolacracyOne, who clearly stated to us that most companies won't _really_ be
fully operational as holacratic organizations for at least six months.
Actually, the tenets of holacracy itself reinforce the idea that you just have
to keep pushing forward no matter how weird it may feel: the first setup step
effectively tears down a bunch of preconceptions about corporate structure,
and you won't really feel like you've gotten to the point where you can
critique holacracy until you rebuild that structure.

The flexibility you get for achieving the new structure is touted as a
feature, but the less marketable truth is that it's a double-edged sword.
Holacracy is purposefully vague on where the authority for hiring, firing, and
budgets will live. Lead Links aren't managers, but they are accountable for
resource allocation that isn't defined elsewhere — and it's up to your company
to figure out what limits are placed, who places the limits and how, what
constitutes a "resource", and so forth. It's entirely possible for an employee
to have zero roles — and it's up to your company to figure out whether that
has any correlation to terminating employment, changing teams, hiring needs,
and so forth. Furthermore, self-defining teams present an unfortunate
opportunity for organizational thrashing; at Moveline, we saw major revisions
to the structure around meta-org work (HR, facilities, finance, etc.) and our
sales/support teams every few months. Those upheavals, while well-intentioned,
degraded individual performance, disrupted internal communication, and fed
back into the underlying dissatisfaction.

I haven't read The Tyranny of Structurelessness cited in many other comments,
but from the title alone I am assuming that it's an accurate depiction.

That said, there is one thing that I feel like holacracy helped with
significantly: the emphasis on well-defined decision-making. When teams
stopped saying " _We_ will get this done" and started routing tasks to
specific individuals (who had an obligation to perform those tasks according
to the roles they held), it was clear that the reduced ambiguity had a
positive impact. The use of "we" has its place in an organization, of course,
but "we" is just a code word for "not sure who" when it comes to planning
specific, concrete work that needs to get done. If you're not careful, things
can get a bit political when it comes to defining authority (at Moveline, this
often related to holacratic "domains"), but I'd still consider the technique
of specific task attribution as something I'd want to bring to future
workplaces.

I'm happy to answer any other questions about my views on holacracy that HNers
might have.

~~~
mdekkers
> The up-front costs associated with shifting from a traditional structure to
> any other structure can be pretty massive; holacracy is no exception to that
> rule. Bigwigs from the official holacracy company (HolacracyOne) came onsite
> to give talks and run the first several meetings, which cost a decent chunk
> of change as well as taking time out of a busy startup's day. Teams and
> roles needed to be defined using the terminology and mechanics of holacracy.
> There were impacts here and there to scheduling, to communication systems,
> and to getting things done in general. Eventually, however, the ramp-up
> phase ended and we were able to experience holacracy in full.

My "Management Consulting Claptrap" red-flag just went up...

> A natural question to ask at this point is "What about backing out of
> holacracy?", to which I'd reply that it's easier said than done. Since a
> not-insignificant amount of effort goes into the initial setup, it's easy to
> fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy. The rationalization is reinforced by
> HolacracyOne, who clearly stated to us that most companies won't really be
> fully operational as holacratic organizations for at least six months.
> Actually, the tenets of holacracy itself reinforce the idea that you just
> have to keep pushing forward no matter how weird it may feel: the first
> setup step effectively tears down a bunch of preconceptions about corporate
> structure, and you won't really feel like you've gotten to the point where
> you can critique holacracy until you rebuild that structure.

...And this makes it sound like a cult - the same tactics as convincing people
about The One True Path(tm)

