
Three modern organisational structures - DanielRibeiro
http://swombat.com/2013/12/23/three-modern-organisational-structures
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columbo
I'm not sure if lumping Zappos (1500 employees) with GitHub (100 employees)
makes much sense. I don't believe the organizational structure has an impact
until you get over a few hundred employees.

It's kind of like sports. If you are playing in a niche sport that only has 3
teams then you don't really need committees to maintain the rulebook, a
referee union, a centralized body to represent the teams or a players' union.

When you're small enough everything just either works or doesn't. The owners
of the company are personally involved, you feel responsible for the success
and there's a great deal of transparency.

With that said I do believe most smaller companies should be flatter, and that
it starts at the top, like not having a CTO, CIO, VP Technology, Director
Technology, Director of IS for a 20 person company.

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michaelochurch
_I don 't believe the organizational structure has an impact until you get
over a few hundred employees._

Disagree. There are 50-person companies with all the negatives of MegaCorps
(bureaucracy, closed allocation). That stuff starts to matter around 15-20
people.

Even before you have actual bureaucracy, if the founders haven't set forth
some strong statements on what they want the company to be, there will be
political behavior very early on as people anticipate what might come about
with growth. Titles are meaningless at 10 people, but people will still fight
for them, knowing that (if the organization moves along the default "main
sequence") they will be massively important in the future.

~~~
Patrick_Devine
I can definitely attest to 50 person bureaucratic companies, having worked in
several. I think this comes down to (as Guy Kawasaki puts it) a Bozo
Explosion. Hire bad people, those people hire bad people and the politics get
bad quickly.

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bowlofpetunias
I'm glad to see this defined as organisational structures instead of the usual
"no managers" nonsense.

"No managers" makes just as much sense as "no receptionists". Whether you need
them depends mostly on context, not philosophy. People tend to confuse
management as job (as in a person who does certain stuff so you don't have to,
just like a receptionist) with management as a tier in a hierarchical
structure.

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mempko
I guess this person never heard of socialist and anarchist organizational
structures... What is old is new again. Except what is new is that many of
these places are wrapped around with a capitalist bow where workers really
don't share profits...

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qwerta
There is 35 years old book surprisingly relevant even today

[http://books.google.gr/books?id=cG6f-mxkJo0C&lpg=PA59&ots=Vz...](http://books.google.gr/books?id=cG6f-mxkJo0C&lpg=PA59&ots=Vzsc6_VCCN&redir_esc=y)

~~~
jdp23
Agreed, Gods of Management is an excellent book. Using that kind of analogy,
Holocracy seems like it would be atheism.

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lindig
How do these super flexible structures integrate accounting, HR, and legal
roles?

~~~
JanezStupar
I have no idea how they actually do it. However if I were tasked with
implementing it, here is what I would do.

Accounting: Set the ground rules about what reporting and data collection
needs to be done by each team/unit/division and the business protocol. Assign
qualified people to supervise.

HR: This one is easy, no HR whatsoever. Need more hands? Bring in suitable
candidates you know and trust. Perhaps supervised by a quorum of peers.

Legal: I think that here you would need a liaison between the company and the
legal firms.

I think that this could be a sane default, let things evolve from here.

~~~
lindig
HR is more than hiring: benefits, vacations, sabbaticals, training. Accounting
would in particular have to deal with orders being made by employees and
invoicing.

~~~
JanezStupar
None of the topics you mentioned require hierarchy.

Benefits: "This is an offer I received from corp X for pension funds. Yay or
Nay?"

Vacations: Take as much vacation as you feel like. If you take too much, your
peers will fire you.

Sabbaticals: If you are worth it you are always welcome back.

Training: Ms Alice. Meet your mentor Bob. Bob will take care of your first
steps within the company and teach you the way we do stuff around here. From
here on you will have a variety of mentors for the different areas of work you
will be working on. You will receive a full voice within the quorum after
period X and after your peers have been satisfied with your indoctrination to
the way we do shit around here.

Accounting: I don't know why orders and invoices could not be handled in the
way I prescribed. There would still be an "accounting" function. Processing
incoming and outgoing payments. You can't have Jack the lorry driver signing
the financial reports, can you?

~~~
sixthloginorso
Neither do they require pizza. They are just functions which must be performed
within a company, and their existence doesn't require that the people in
charge of them have authority over, say, the programmers. I mean, the sales
folk don't boss you around, nor you the accountant, right?

> Benefits: "This is an offer I received from corp X for pension funds. Yay or
> Nay?"

There's a bit more paperwork involved in that than just that where you live,
I'm sure. There should probably be someone who knows it, and files the
business-end of it. Hell, with their knowledge, they could even offer you
advise about the different conditions and regulations as you are seeking
pension funds and insurance!

Also, individual employees may have had agreed different terms and conditions
in their work contracts that someone should deal with and keep track of them.

> Training: Ms Alice. Meet your mentor Bob.

You'll meet him at the meeting room as he arrives from Big Training Corp, Inc.
We took care of the cookies and the billing, don't worry.

Also, who calls the plumber when the sink gets clogged and pays him? Oh, and
somebody needs to find a new cleaner when Joe retires next month (you knew
that Joe retired next month, right?)

> Accounting: I don't know why orders and invoices could not be handled in the
> way I prescribed.

It sounds rather hard and it's probably just something that should be handled
by a few qualified people anyway as you say?

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jwilliams
Just a few other (older) examples - Gore-tex (WL Gore), Patagonia and Semco
have had structures that could be described as self-organizing or "flat". 3M
is another example.

Edit: Another one that I reference, Automattic.

~~~
swombat
If you want to learn about Semco, make sure you read "The Seven Day Weekend",
not just "Maverick!", since the former gives an updated view of the business
from 2004 or so.

Would be interesting to see what Semco looks like today - probably nothing
like what it was in 2004.

~~~
jwilliams
Will do, I have only read Maverick - it and the other examples were one of the
reasons I took on my own startup.

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cateye
Wiki:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holacracy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holacracy)

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DanielBMarkham
I'd add "inverted", where small, cross-functional teams make critical
decisions and an organizational hierarchy above them make less and less
important ones.

Good stuff. Needs more work, though. Thanks Swombat!

