
The end of bosses - mjshampine
http://fullstart.com/knowledge/the-end-of-bosses/
======
learc83
I've always thought of most companies like machines. Some guy who is really
passionate comes along and builds it, but eventually he/she leaves or loses
interest and the machine grinds away until it eventually collapses. Some
machines are very well built and last longer than others, but without
maintenance they'll all eventually collapse.

Basically most companies, like machines, are just an extension of someone's
will. Human will is the only thing that can stave off the inevitable decay,
and when no cares any longer, it's over.

The only way to delay this is to hire people who are competent and passionate,
and give them enough autonomy so that instead of functioning as part of a
machine that will break down, they can exert their will to fight entropy and
keep it going.

~~~
drjesusphd
I think this point of view is biased from the perspective of an entrepeneur.
You seem to be over-valuing the contribution of the founders, to the point
where you're implying that everything that happens after the founder leaves
the picture is all his/her doing.

Would you make a similar analogy of nation-states? The Catholic Church?

~~~
learc83
I'm sorry, I should have made my point more clear.

The gist of what I'm saying is that if you treat people like machines, they
act like machines. If your organization is setup as a strict hierarchy with
zero autonomy, it will function as a giant machine, only kept going by the
person/people controlling it.

They alternative to this is to maximize autonomy for all your employees. Allow
your people to be people. There is an innate human desire to create, to
organize, to make an impact, to move from chaos to order--to fight entropy.
Harnessing that desire is, in my opinion, the best way to run a company.

I'll give you an example. A McDonald's employee isn't happy with his job, but
one day he decides to make the best of it and just do the best job he can. He
walks into work intent on making the best damn hamburger he can make. But then
he realizes...he can't do that. His job isn't to make the best hamburger he
can make, it's to make the exact same hamburger made by every other employee
at every other McDonald's. In this case what we've done is to take a human and
do our best to turn him into a robot.

------
RougeFemme
I liked/agreed with everything in this article _except_ the Sunday test. I get
that people need to be compatible in order to work together. I don't get why
people need to want to hang out together on Sundays. It all but guarantees
that people who are otherwise qualified _and_ compatible with the team Mon-Sat
will not be hired. Nothing terribly wrong with that, but why not just hire
your techie frat brothers or sorority sisters?

~~~
triplesec
Yep. this part of the piece only works if the company is a cooperative, or
you're just back to "get them to drink the kool-aid and sell their lives to
the company" psychological slavery.

~~~
harrisonweber
I've seen this idea work well in very young companies (2 to 10 employees). It
can boost morale at that size, but it would likely feel forced beyond a
handful of employees.

------
izolate
Problem is, there are people who get off on authority. Some of them will
eventually slip through the cracks and start to infect your company - unless
you diligently keep the culture alive.

~~~
exo_duz
I think that's part of the whole idea. There are lots of talks at the moment
about hiring the right people for the culture of your company. And obviously I
believe that if you are creating a hierarchy-less culture then you should go
for those people who show those traits.

I personally believe the whole idea of non-hierarchical society better such as
in Western Universities where students call professors, lecturers by their
first name. Whereas it is toally opposite in Japan where you have to address
them by their titles (Dr or Professor so and so).

------
theboss
I like to think of companies like a computer program. A startup isnt written
in anything it is completely implemented in hardware. As the company grows it
is necessary to add these different layers of abstraction until you end up
with the CEO and board of a huge company in the application layer.

I don't think you can maintain a flat structure forever. Even people within
valve have written about its "flatness". I've at least read that there is just
a different set of internal issues.

~~~
JimboOmega
I was trying to think of a way to say this, but I think you summed it up
fairly nicely.

I've read too many articles on HN on how managers shouldn't exist. IIRC, at
Google it had become something of a general complaint that there was a lack of
managers. That is, there might be 100 employees to one manager, and you'd only
see this guy once a year when it came to be review cycle.

Managers actually _do_ something, and it's not just to micro-manage, set
arbitrary deadlines, etc. It's quite possible for teams to organize towards a
task without one. But managers do a lot of other things besides yell at
people.

I think the common view is too heavily informed by bad bosses. It's true bad
management is worse than none, but that doesn't mean none is ideal.

------
benjaminwootton
> _Mature startups like Valve and Github and smaller up-and-comers like
> Treehouse and Medium have done away with managers who boss people around and
> expect servile compliance._

Valve, the post child for this model within this community, was founded in
1996 [1], so this is not necessarily a new idea or something limited to
startups.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Corporation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Corporation)

~~~
Ovid
I have a huge section in my talks all about how Valve makes this work. They're
damned impressive.

------
wyclif
Can I admit here that I hate "the Sunday test"? I wouldn't ever want to use
that on somebody, nor would I want it applied to me.

~~~
jroseattle
Bingo. These types of litmus tests always get strained the more an
organization grows, and eventually organizations outgrow them.

And as frustrating as these things are from the to-be-hired side, I have
dozens of colleagues who _strongly_ complain about these practices in their
own companies. They always use the same words -- "false positives", meaning
that someone was considered an ideal candidate but they failed the do-i-want-
to-play-cards-with-them test.

What surprises me is how everyone claims to be data-driven, yet when faced
with the aspect of hiring, the same choices are repeated over and over, which
(shockingly) leads to the same results. In a field where creativity is
important, we as an industry are forcing people to fit into a certain persona,
all with the goal of being predictable, interchangeable parts. Great minds may
think alike, but I've never heard "like minds think great."

As with other trends, this too shall pass.

------
Ovid
This is probably one of the hardest things for many companies to grasp today.
One of the things I do for a living is give full-day presentations to
companies looking at Agile from a "strategic" position. In short, companies
often do agile development, but they still lay down hard deadlines, micro-
manage projects, and provide command-and-control rather than support-and-
deliver. This problem is the elephant in the room of agile: what do we do with
managers when we have self-directed teams?

If you look at the Feudal era (this is a gross oversimplification and varies
wildly from from country to country), we had a king who gave land/authority to
dukes, who gave land/authority to barons, who gave land/authority to knights,
who had serfs work their fiefs. In return, the serfs had a place to live and
gave food and goods to the knights, who pledged service to their liege, who
pledged service to theirs, up to the king. The king also taxed every level of
this and made orders of magnitude more money than the serfs.

There were a couple of interesting side-effects of this. First, while you were
technically loyal to your king, he didn't have much day-to-day impact and your
loyalty was to those immediately surrounding you. Communication throughout the
realm was slow or non-existent, further isolating communities. Politics were
local, not national, and these made made medieval intrigues all the more
fascinating. Second, there were _no price signals_ inside of a feudal society.
As a result, you couldn't have a functioning economy in the modern sense.

And then about 300 years ago we had more and more international trade and many
lords discovered that by displacing their peasants/serfs they could do things
such as raise sheep and sell the wool for a far greater profit than having
people harvesting food[1]. So you wound up with a bunch of free men traveling
the land, selling their services where they could. In other words, you had one
of the foundations to a modern economy: a mobile labor force.

Today, that feudal model still exists: inside of many large corporations. It's
a mess of internal politics. People have loyalty to their teams and maybe
their boss, but not so much to Steve Ballmer. There are few, if any, internal
price signals. _Internally_. If you commit "treason" by suggesting Ballmer
should be fired, you might get laid off, but not executed. You have hiring and
firing instead of births and deaths to maintain the work force. In may
respects, the modern corporation resembles the old feudal system, but sped up
many times. And the king/CEO still earns orders of magnitude more money than
the workers/serfs, completely out of proportion to actual value provided.

Agile itself had its roots back in the 50s, but as a modern movement in
programming, agile is still just over a decade old. We don't know what's
happening to the traditional role of management, but the feudal system
couldn't compete with capitalism. I don't think that traditional corporations
can, either.

1\.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_capitalism#Enclosure...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_capitalism#Enclosures_and_the_transition_from_feudalism)

 _Edit_ : A couple of tiny clarifications.

~~~
hcho
So, playing the devil's advocate for a bit here, are the agile companies
without managers delivering consistently better results than companies with
managers?

Companies grasp one thing quite easily and it's their bottom line. Maybe,
agile is not delivering better enough to have an impact on the bottom line and
all this discussion is, well, moot.

~~~
Ovid
That's a long and complicated story. The short answer is "we don't know". One
company that hired me complained that every agile trainer they've spoken with
has done a terrible job of explaining the role of management and I have to
explain that's because it's one area that agile really doesn't have a good
grasp of. It's a time of tremendous experimentation and we don't yet know how
this is going to play out.

That being said, in my training I give several examples of Agile companies
that either have no management or very flat hierarchies, such as 37signals,
github, Booking.com and Valve. There are many reasons why they're successful
and it would be silly to simply say it's because they're jettisoning
management. However, we know that large companies tend to be significantly
worse at innovation (Steve Jobs is an anomaly) and they also often focus on
risk avoidance rather than reward.

The primary strengths of many large companies is name recognition, financial
reserves, and mature products. That's _very_ hard for smaller companies to
compete against, particularly given the old saw of "nobody got fired for
buying IBM/Microsoft/$insert_large_corporation_here".

------
mason55
We are a combination of managed/professional services + platform development
and this is exactly how our hierarchy has evolved. We have account managers
that drive a lot of timelines but we don't want account managers to actually
be the boss of the engineers. We had everyone "reporting" to the CTO for
awhile but recently broke things up into teams. I've got a number of people
who report to me but their work is not always driven by me. In the same way, I
report to the CTO but it's very rare for him to give me something to do
outside of maybe a high level priority. It's much more common for me to do
work directly with our CEO.

Information is shared freely around the company, hiring decisions are made
relatively democratically, we hand out tasks to people who have skills,
expertise, time and the desire to do them, not giving cushy work to people who
play the politics game.

At first I felt like I should be doing more as a manager, like I should be
managing more, but there's really not a lot for me to do. I help out my team
when they need it but we hire good people so everyone seems to enjoy working
autonomously and being self-driven.

 _> With peer management, accountability isn’t to a boss or supervisor, it’s
to each other, your team, your company, your customers, and yourself._

I'm frequently working for six different account managers, plus my own
initiatives, plus something for the CEO. The person who knows the least about
what I'm working on is probably my boss and it works out well that way.

------
fingerprinter
I'm a huge advocate of ideas like this (repeat, huge), but like many things in
life, it is dramatically more complicated when you dig in.

First, hierarchies always form. They might be informal, or quasi-transient,
but in the absence of explicit, implicit forms.

Second, things like this are great when the teams are small, or even
relatively small. Though once the company grows they start to become
impractical. And when you get to a certain size company they would be
impossible. I'd love to see a multiple thousand person company in this form
with some details on how it operates. I'm nearly certain we'd see "bosses" (in
some sense of the word) emerge from somewhere.

Lastly, who mediates? Who makes the hard call? Who pivots the company? Who
pivots the product? Who starts a new product? Who axes an existing product? Do
people/teams/products/projects have budgets?

The point being, "bossless" (what a terrible term) is great when things are
going well, but not so great when hard calls need to be made. If you have ever
been in a death spiral for lack of money or bad-product fit, I'm sure you'll
know what I'm talking about.

I'd love to see some case studies on how it worked at very large companies as
well as how it worked when times were really bad.

------
rpedela
What about informal hierarchies? Do they form in these companies? If not, why
not? If they do form, do they cause similar problems to a traditional
hierarchy?

~~~
Ovid
Internally Valve forms temporary hierarchies to shepherd projects along and
there are also anecdotal accounts from ex-Valve employees that things aren't
as "egalitarian" inside as they claim and that some people with seniority have
more authority than is claimed.

That being said, I've had a hard time verifying any of this stuff and it's
rather a given that a company would be reluctant to air their dirty laundry.

~~~
RougeFemme
I would think that, no matter how hard a company tries to hire people of the
same mindset, temporary hierarchies would develop - not necessarily along the
lines of seniority, but along the lines of who had more
experience/comfort/knowledge of best practices, etc. regarding a particular
domain, technology, etc.

Ideally, the hierarchy would be truly temporary and whatever
knowledge/experience/insight caused one person to become the project
"shepherd" would be willingly shared amongst the other folks.

------
kgmpers
This article sounds like it's talking about a form of cooperative, without
calling it a cooperative, which isn't a new idea, but certainly is one that is
starting to become more mainstream. For example, the UN named 2012 the "Year
of the Cooperative." I'd like to believe that people are starting to see
cooperatives as a way of organizing businesses outside of only coffee shops
and grocery stores.

Yes! Magazine came out with a good series not too long ago on cooperatives in
operation today, their varieties, their benefits.
[http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/how-cooperatives-are-
drivi...](http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/how-cooperatives-are-driving-the-
new-economy/the-cooperative-way)

