
Companies of the future: No CEO, no boss, managed by blockchain - ivorium
https://venturebeat.com/2017/04/23/companies-of-the-future-no-ceo-no-boss-managed-by-blockchain/?utm_content=bufferb6e1e&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer
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infinii
The concept of a DAO is too simplistic when presented in all these examples.
An organization has multiple levels and on each level there are many decisions
being made constantly. Some escalate up, some don't. You cannot just expect
that each decision within an organization will be decided via a DAO's
shareholder voting mechanism because what will ultimately happen is, there are
so many actions to vote on, shareholders will ignore most. If there were 100
shareholders, 2 voted yes, 1 voted no and 97 didn't vote. Do you proceed? This
is why a board exists, to represent the interests of shareholders. How much
work do you think would get done if you needed to prioritize things with a
large body of shareholders on a regular basis?

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hossbeast
What about a variant which employs representative democracy? Shareholders vote
for members to serve on a decision making board.

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danmaz74
And then the board selects a CEO to run the day-to-day operations... and we're
back to the current system.

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danmaz74
I don't see anything in this idea that can't be done without a blockchain. As
a matter of fact, organizations based on the same principles have existed for
(at least) a couple hundred years:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative)

~~~
open_bear
Paraphrasing Sheldon fron "The Big Bang Theory": "Everything is better with
blockchain".

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dammitcoetzee
Ya'll need to go outside.

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6nf
They talk about members voting on external contractors. This is not really a
new concept and it's basically how governments work too. And we know stuff
like this is still susceptible to curruption and bribery. The difference is
that with a DAO there's nobody to take responsibility, so these problems will
be amplified. I don't really think it will work in general. There may be some
narrow, specific things that this will work for but it can't replace actual
corporations.

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nosuchthing
This documentary "Machines of Loving Grace" immediately comes to mind;

[https://thoughtmaybe.com/all-watched-over-by-machines-of-
lov...](https://thoughtmaybe.com/all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-
grace/)

    
    
      Part one explores the myth that rose up in the 1990s that 
      computers could create a new kind of stable world: They 
      would bring about a new kind global capitalism purportedly 
      free of risk and failure, without the boom and bust of the 
      past, would abolish centralised political power, and 
      create a new kind of democracy mediated by technology and 
      the Internet, where millions of people would be connected 
      as nodes in cybernetic systems without hierarchy. This 
      film explores how this myth came to be by following two 
      groups that converged on the ideas. One is the small group 
      of disciples around the novelist Ayn Rand in the 1950s who 
      saw themselves as a prototype for a future society where  
      everyone could follow their own selfish desires and that   
      would somehow create a stable and equitable society. The  
      other is the digital entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley, many 
      of whom were also disciples of Ayn Rand, that espoused 
      grand visions of global utopia to be delivered by their 
      technology. They believed that new computer networks would 
      allow the creation of a society where everyone would also 
      follow their own self-interest but that would similarly 
      somehow miraculously bringing a stable and equitable 
      society too. They were joined by Alan Greenspan who had 
      also been a disciple of Ayn Rand, who became convinced 
      that the computers were creating a new kind of “stable  
      capitalism.”

~~~
provost
I haven't read the works of Ayn Rand, but this quote makes her sound like a
cult leader.

Does the author of this documentary have a bit of a disdain for her, or is he
merely saying that her readers/followers are misguided in some way?

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spiralx
> I haven't read the works of Ayn Rand, but this quote makes her sound like a
> cult leader.

Ayn Rand was very much like a cult leader if you read all about her and her
followers, known as "The Collective".

[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/11/09/possessed-3](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/11/09/possessed-3)

[https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0085E7E3E](https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0085E7E3E)

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mrtschndr
Whether the technology can be molded in a way to address the need to make
hundreds of "votes" or decisions a day I think is inevitable and it will
happen.

I think what this author gets wrong is that a great boss is as _amazing_ as a
bad boss is shitty. People ultimately want to be led, they want to learn and
be inspired. I don't seen an etheruem smart contract inspiring humanity on its
own.

~~~
rsj_hn
As usual, this is a solution in search of a problem. It adds a lot of
complexity to re-implement solved problems in expensive ways, while not
addressing the very real unsolved problems of corporate governance, none of
which involve a lack of technology to record/tally votes.

Look at Enron, for example, setting up fake trading floors, or lying to
investors. What happens inside organizations is opaque. This is a fundamental
characteristic of public corporations because if shareholders got full
transparency, then a rival business could purchase 1 share of stock, or have
an agent purchase 1 share of stock, and then they would know everything
happening inside of their competitor. A vendor could purchase 1 share of
stock, and gain access to competitive pricing information, etc. So
corporations are necessarily secretive. They embargo information, and they
don't provide a lot of specifics. They give only roll up summaries to public
investors and don't release enough information for investors to verify that
the summaries are correct.

None of that will change at all with blockchain. This isn't a technological
problem, where we don't have a way of correctly tallying votes, or we lack
mechanisms of sharing information with investors, so thank God blockchain came
along so we'd know how to hold elections.

As long as anyone can dispose or acquire a share in the open market,
corporations are going to withhold most of the details from shareholders.

It doesn't matter what protocols the shareholders are going to use to reach
agreement or count votes. They will never have enough visibility into the
workings of the corporation in order to be able to enforce this type of
micromanagement.

Going back to actually addressing the problem -- the current state of the art
is to have third party auditor verify the roll up summary statements. This
auditor is necessarily bound to secrecy -- e.g. they cannot disclose to
shareholders the proprietary information that went into verifying the
summaries. The state of the art is to trust these auditors and to have
penalties for making misleading statements. However these audits are
necessarily a manual and expensive process, as they require judgement to
classify millions of transactions into known categories which then roll up to
income and balance sheet statements. How would blockchain help here? The
transaction is secret, and without the appropriate contextual information, we
don't know how to classify it. Is this working capital, should that be booked
as revenue for this quarter, should we do a Goodwill write off, etc? But if
shareholders can't be trusted with enough contextual information to adjudicate
even these types of classification problems, how are they going to adjudicate
the hundreds of thousands of smaller decisions that happen every day in a
firm? On the other hand, if we are relying on third party auditors, then what
do we need the blockchain for?

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lifeisstillgood
I don't get the revolution to the n'th degree thing. Companies in the modern
world are ripe for really deep chnage (weird oasis of top down dictatorships
in a democratic society, centrally planned economies trying to espouse free
market thinking)

Ronald Coase' theory of the firm tells us as organising anything gets easier
firm sizes will shrink - and the Internet _should_ make organising anything
easier - the blockchain being a great low cost such technology.

But - why the total war approach. Why "no leader, no management, totally
decentralised". I think we shall see "Programmable companies" arise but this
extreme article just seems silly - we will get revolutionary improvements - be
happy and be prepared don't moan it's not enough.

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mc32
It's an exercise in thought and hive management. Will it work? Who knows.

My concern is that while humans can be terrible managers, an automated system
that has no checks (depending on how it's set up) could end up being worse if
it does not take into account dealing with unforeseen challenges and
repercussions if it's dissociated from people.

~~~
NotUsingLinux
The point is I guess humans can only do so much, and the question now with a
DAO is: Can we create Code/Algorithm than can align more people, "better" than
a human manager could do?

Even if code only allows for "better" cooperation in some narrow dimensions,
if these are important to the participants, this system will win.

DAOs are about scaling human collaboration.

It's not completely AI, but a way to understand ourselves in great masses
better than we are able to to by ourselves.

Think about that.

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kapauldo
The blockchain is the new vr. It's only good for a few things but now people
are dreaming up and investing in unrealistic uses for it.

~~~
libertine
What is going on?!

Why do they pick the bad examples to serve as the argument for what they are
trying to shove down our throats?

What about the Good Boss? The person you look up to, the holder of the company
vision, the one that motivates you - even without talking to you? Someone
who's there, simply put.

Are they so disconnected from reality that they forget we're talking about
people here? Do they think people would want to work for an organization
without a head, who's directives trickle down from a blockchain decision in a
memo on their email boxes?

There are plenty of examples where the board had no clue what they are talking
about, because there's only that much that can be carried on a report.

This is ridiculous.

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Animats
This is like trying to run a business by having everything done on TaskRabbit
or Upwork.

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eigenrick
I know the depiction of DAO in this article is rather simplistic, but, wow.

The main thing it says to me is that the contractor of the future has to be
adept at marketing and communicating to an audience of shareholders in the
company, as well as doing their job.

I would guess that most contractors wouldn't make the grade according to
investors. After a few rounds of abject failures, I would reckon that the
investors would come up with a scheme where they hire someone to intermediate
for them.. someone who could better speak the contractors' language in order
to deliver requirements. While they're at it, this person could also manage
the schedule. Such a scheme would make it so the technician would only have to
communicate to one person instead of a large group.

Eventually this intermediator would get so busy that they'd no longer have the
time or energy to communicate with this army of people, so they'd have to hire
someone else to do it for them...

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itaris
Isn't this basically anarcho-syndicalism?

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c0nducktr
But with a higher carbon footprint

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achow
Another thing I'm having hard time visualizing is how would innovation work or
how to avoid 'design by committee', we have hard time as it is now to avoid
new thinking not getting side swiped by legacy thinking in an organization.

~~~
choxi
A good place to start would be understanding the holocracy model and why it
hasn't become more mainstream yet. Companies like Valve and Medium have
experimented with flat organizations to varying degrees of success (I believe
Medium ended their holacracy experiment in favor of a more traditional org
structure).

Personally, I believe decentralized organizations will look more like small
markets than companies. You could almost argue that a completely flat
organization _is_ a market. What's the difference between a completely
decentralized Uber and a "ridesharing market" of drivers and riders whose
logistics, contracts, and payments are handled by a blockchain instead of
people?

~~~
achow
Thanks for the pointer.

Good example for Holocracy would be Zappos. Interesting read on their
experience around it..

HOW A RADICAL SHIFT LEFT ZAPPOS REELING. [http://fortune.com/zappos-tony-
hsieh-holacracy/](http://fortune.com/zappos-tony-hsieh-holacracy/)

Excerpts:

Employees were shocked and frustrated by the numerous mandates, the endless
meetings, and the confusion about who did what.

Holacracy created new winners and losers—and it sparked fresh ideas. With
experience and expertise de-emphasized, less “typical” and more junior types
have been able to succeed. Introverts have benefited from the expectation that
everybody speak in meetings.

Holacracy also lacks some crucial elements, such as a compensation process.
The system doesn’t value seniority or the size of your budget. There are no
formal performance evaluations. How, then, do you calculate how much to a pay
a person, and for that matter, who makes the decision?

Holacracy’s value remains far from proven. Its creator, Robertson, says the
process takes five to 10 years to be fully integrated—an eon in business.

Some 300 companies use his system—Zappos is easily the largest—and there have
been failures. In early March, content site Medium announced it was abandoning
it. Bud Caddell, a consultant who has studied self-management systems, says
his former firm, Undercurrent, tried it without success. “I found it extremely
dogmatic and rigid and overly complex, and it took attention away from our
customers,” Caddell says.

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tobbe2064
"Boss" a weird way to spell employment

