
Zappos has quietly backed away from holacracy - donmcc
https://qz.com/work/1776841/zappos-has-quietly-backed-away-from-holacracy/
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BoiledCabbage
More interesting to me is the second half of their article, and them having
every team track profit and losses and be held accountable for being
profitable to an external customer or another internal team.

And the talked tackled the "R&D problem" by having R&D teams find a "sponsor"
who would benefit from their eventual work. Really curious how it'll work out.

Do you end up with more efficiency by making every team compete in an internal
marketplace and have to address customer needs to stay profitable? Or do teams
find ways to carve out mini-monolopies and moats just like in the outside
world and live off the fat of inefficiency.

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vsskanth
I've worked in a company before where all R&D teams need to be sponsored by
other product teams. I don't have any opinions for or against this approach.
Just my observations

Pros:

* R&D teams don't veer off into random tangents and are focused on delivering something useful

* More accountability and a closer connection to their end customer (internal or external)

Cons:

* you end up with more management layers and a lot more meetings to convince teams to fund you

* getting budget to maintain stuff is difficult to sponsor

* Empire building and a lot of infighting between competing teams

* product teams won't fund longer-term projects and moonshot experiments so you have to create a separate product team just for that

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mc32
Ah... I have memories of “disruptive” managers lauding this approach to
management whole kit and kaboodle.

I derided it as reminiscent of soviet-style of management by collectives and
committees.

The manager saw that in a bad light. Guess I lacked team spirit as it were.

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richliss
In Adam Curtis documentary "All watched over by machines of loving grace"
there's a part about the communes in the 1960's and how they all descended
into lord of the flies style bullying with alpha personalities.

Teal management ideas are absolutely at risk of the same problem.

I remember people pushing Teal in agile meetups a few years ago and all of
those people would have been the alphas inside those communes.

Management helps protects the quiet types.

~~~
Matticus_Rex
I see this show up in the broader Teal movement, definitely, but not really in
Holacracy. The reliance on process rather than "Teal principles" holds space
for people who don't demand it, and holds those alphas to the process as well.

