
Are Bosses Necessary? A radical experiment at Zappos - gpresot
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/are-bosses-necessary/403216/?single_page=true
======
hrnnnnnn
Worth reading "The Tyranny of Structurelessness". It's from the 70s and is
specifically about the women's movement, but is applicable to these kinds of
discussions.

Whenever you have a flat hierarchy, informal structures will arise in place of
explicit ones.

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

"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."

~~~
hammerzeit
100 times this. Eliminating structure just transfers the heavy lifting to
informal mechanisms -- i.e. your "culture." No culture is sufficiently well-
defined that everybody has a consistent definition of it, meaning you will
inevitably have a situation where 2 people are doing directly contradictory
things in the name of the company culture. The whole situation at GitHub from
a few years ago with a founder's wife running reckless is a perfect example of
this.

Ultimately there are probably non-hierarchical models that allow for effective
and interesting coordination in certain types of small organizations (viz the
Kibbutz), but Holocracy seems like it's replacing Shit Umbrellas with Shit
Centrifuges.

~~~
Glench
Holacracy actually has way _more_ structure than a hierarchy. Just look at the
constitution
([http://www.holacracy.org/constitution](http://www.holacracy.org/constitution)),
or read about the rigid way they conduct meetings.

~~~
jacques_chester
> _read about the rigid way they conduct meetings._

It reminds me of common rules of order, except untested by the courts and not
covering the many, _many_ permutations of motions that can arise.

I'd just be inclined to use Robert's Rules or a local equivalent. Meeting
procedure works very well, when you use it correctly and consistently.

------
otis_inf
Hierarchy is not only there for 'telling X to do ABC', but also to make clear
who takes responsibility. If there's no leader, who's responsible for
decisions taken? A random person who happens to be in a team who did something
which turned out to be very stupid? All of them? No one? When a decision is
made by X, the people who execute it didn't decide on it, X did, which means X
takes responsibility, not the people who execute the decision.

Another aspect which is overlooked in the article is: to get things done, you
have to make unpopular decisions sometimes: i.e. cut features to make a
deadline, to ship a version, to stop adding stuff and work towards a release.
No-one wants to make those, they're called 'unpopular' for a reason. But you
have to make them to avoid a state where things aren't ready and never will
be. There's a difference between 'being able to ship' and 'being able to ship
a usable product'.

Funny that they refer to Valve with the text:

> At the video-game maker Valve, new employees are told not to expect
> instructions, because even the managing director “isn’t your manager,” says
> the employee handbook. “You have the power to green-light projects. You have
> the power to ship products.” And so they do.

I'd like to mention 'Half Life 3'. ;)

~~~
cma
>If there's no leader, who's responsible for decisions taken? A random person
who happens to be in a team who did something which turned out to be very
stupid?

Blame-shifting doesn't always happen, but when it does, it almost universally
goes down the hierarchy, not up.

~~~
hoorayimhelping
Almost universally? Got any examples that show this almost universal
attribute? Off the top of my head, from the past couple of months alone, I can
think of the VW CEO, Ellen Page (reddit's former CEO) who were ousted from
their companies for decisions that didn't go over well.

~~~
noblethrasher
We should probably put a “*” by Pao since, as far as I know, we’re not sure if
she was actually responsible for the decision that ostensibly got her ousted.

~~~
ascagnel_
When there's a big enough controversy, the CEO will usually be one of the
first heads to roll even as there are larger investigations going on
(BP/Deepwater Horizon is a great example of this).

~~~
jrs235
(Volkswagen)

~~~
cma
You think the Volkswagen CEO resignation was a result of blame shifting?

------
moonshinefe
It's an interesting experiment, but two tendencies of human nature prevent
this sort of thing from being conducive to running an efficient company, in my
opinion.

One, having everyone in the company able to make executive decisions or at
least influence them sounds great, but inevitably more outgoing and
charismatic workers will gain influence, even when it's a supposed democracy.
You can structure the system to have all the meetings and groups and power
structures you want that seem equal on paper, but when someone is popular and
outgoing often people will follow with that person. There are going to be
people who slip into leadership roles--it's human nature, and trying to
minimize that instead of steer it is impractical in my opinion.

The second thing is that having everyone in on the decision making is simply
information overload in most cases. I think tasking everyone with being
informed and voting on a wide array of things will make them either pretend to
know all the issues properly and vote uninformed, or they'll vote the way they
see their favoured peers voting. Maybe I'm letting my own experiences cloud my
opinion here, since I work at a company that has a fairly flat managerial
structure, but it's certainly a problem for me. If they're making executive
decisions while not seeing what other ways the company is moving, that seems
bad too.

I think there's definitely merit in promoting equality among employees, and it
leads to better teamwork. But I just don't think that end of the extreme ever
works particularly efficiently, and I think human nature tends to influence
most companies toward the more normal business hierarchies.

~~~
Menge
These concerns make sense if we assume that they have no processes. My
understanding is that they are using holocracy, so there are defined processes
each with leaders (like boards with a chair) and these process are organized
in a hierarchy that allows some to be overridden/replaced/reformed by boards
with more central power. So, people can and should try to have many roles but
will naturally get pushed out of things where they lack time, knowledge or
trust, and not everyone is involved in every process or is allowed to nominate
themselves to be involved.

------
evolve2k
None of the recent articles have mentioned it but hollcracy is a American
commercialized edit of Sociocracy aka Open Governance
([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociocracy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociocracy)).

The seminal text is "We the People"
([http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0979282705/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0979282705/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1444302659&sr=81&pi=SY200_QL40&keywords=we+the+people+sociocracy&dpPl=1&dpID=51GeMtGtfCL&ref=plSrch))
[no affiliate]

The analogy would be how Scrum was created as a commercialized revision of
Agile XP.

A key tenant is the rights of each circle (team/committee) to actively chose
how it will make decisions, and it's free to use systems such as voting or
putting someone "in charge", but it also has a bunch of innovative decision
making approaches that achieve much better buy in and are based on achieving
consent as opposed to consensus. It's the difference between, 70% of people
are on board so we are going ahead regardless of what the rest think. And
we'll we've heard from everyone and even those that have stated publically to
try rest of the group that they have concerns they are no longer blocking
"paramount" concerns and we are united in our agreeance to go ahead.

~~~
jacques_chester
> _The analogy would be how Scrum was created as a commercialized revision of
> Agile XP._

Scrum was developed independently of, and is quite distinct from, XP.

------
bobjordan
I tried to go without assigning bosses on my R&D engineering team, a group of
about 8 people, and I did this for about six months. I thought these are
creative smart types and don't really need a boss. But after time I found,
without bosses, people do crazy stuff, like sit at their desk for two days
without internet/email access and just not tell anyone about it or ask for
help to fix their issue. Now, all teams have a report and that just works
better.

~~~
ritchiea
That sounds like an entirely different problem. You shouldn't need a boss to
speak up and communicate to someone that your work environment is broken.

~~~
michaelt
OK, there's an entirely different problem. Who is responsible for fixing the
problem if not the guy's boss?

~~~
UK-AL
The infrastructure team?

~~~
michaelt
If a guy has sat at their desk for two days without internet/email access and
didn't tell anyone about it or ask for help, you can hardly blame the
infrastructure team for not fixing a problem they weren't told about.

The problem is either a cultural one within the team (if he was scared to ask
colleagues for help) or an induction one (if he didn't know how to ask for
help, or didn't know he had to) or a communication one (if he had no way to
contact infrastructure or anyone on his team) or a motivation/expectation
setting one (if he felt like taking an in-office vacation, or that nobody
would notice or mind if he did nothing) or a hiring one (if he didn't know
what a computer was, or he was being intentionally uncooperative as some sort
of protest against his own job)

All those problems are things I'd expect a competent line manager to address.

~~~
jonlucc
On the communication one: I work for a large pharma company that switched from
physical phones to VOIP through Lync. Well they sent an email a week in
advance and updated Lync, but the update required a user to sign in again. I
had many people ask me what to do, but the other wisdom floating around was to
call our IT help line. Without Lync, we can't make calls to fix Lync.

------
mattlutze
For further reading, the New Republic article thread a few days ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10329831](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10329831)

~~~
gadders
That was a good article, I thought. The process to get yourself a raise sounds
ridiculous.

------
Phemist
This seems very similar to Valve's boss-free "flat" structure -
[http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...](http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf)

~~~
moonshinefe
Indeed the article briefly mentions Valve.

------
mrmondo
I was at a conference and sitting in an open space about leadership when I
came to an epiphany: 'You hear of organisations that are management heavy all
the time, but you never hear of organisations being leadership heavy'.

~~~
shostack
I worked in a place that became leadership heavy. They gradually were losing
business and kept bringing in more executive-level "heavy hitters" to
hopefully turn things around.

In reality what happened was that every one of them that was hired was made to
think they were the silver bullet and now that they were there, everything
would turn around, as long as we did things their way.

Well, you get a few executives on board who are in theory all on the "same
level", all thinking they are the silver bullet, and all thinking that things
need to be done their way and you can imagine the epic power struggles that
ensued.

Did not end well.

------
Glench
To the many people who say "this will never work": luckily, we don't have to
theorize abstractly about "human nature" and can just go look at successful
non-hierarchical organizations. Frederic Laloux describes the practices of 12
of them in the 2nd and 3rd parts of his wonderful book Reinventing
Organizations
([http://www.reinventingorganizations.com/](http://www.reinventingorganizations.com/)).
Still some very new ideas, but these organizations have enough interesting
properties that we should really explore how to make them work.

------
k__
I had leading positions in the past.

I saw two problems there:

1\. Most people don't want to make any decision.

2\. The few people who want to make decisions, do it only for their personal
gain. Deciding for stuff they like or they just like the prestige a decider-
role brings.

I ended up in such roles, because I know 1. can be a big problem and before
nothing happens, I just tell people what to do.

And I often quit jobs, because of 2. and the bigger the institutions get, the
more of 2. you get.

~~~
ThrustVectoring
Furthermore, there's a good filter in place for the kind of people who can
succeed on the 'down' end of the Boss interface. It's usually a college degree
or work history of some sort. There's no good filter for the kind of people
who are able to actually make decisions. I mean, you might be able to recruit
from some particularly agent-y community, or design a test based off of
constructive developmental theory, but good luck with all that.

------
mattlutze
I appreciate their optimistic counterpoint, but some of the challenges Zappos
have created for themselves -- how do you exactly keep "earning badges" a fair
and representatives measure of an employee's worth? -- will be difficult and
challenging to overcome.

Hsieh is asking a lot of his employees. I hope it ends up being worth the
confusion and anxiety being generated for the entire workforce there.

------
rkwasny
When you do not make any changes to your web site for 2 years bosses are not
necessary.[1] Just doing nothing is enough.

[1] [http://highscalability.com/blog/2015/10/7/zapposs-website-
fr...](http://highscalability.com/blog/2015/10/7/zapposs-website-frozen-for-
two-years-as-it-integrates-with-a.html)

