How do Managerless / Bossless organisations work?
https://corporate-rebels.com/how-to-organize-a-large-organization-without-middle-management/ Following are some companies that claim to be managerless: GitHub (American IT company with ~900 employees. Owned by Microsoft.) Valve (American IT company with ~400 employees. Owned by founder Gabe Newell.) Morning Star (American food company with ~600 employees. Owned by founder Chris Rufer.) Zappos (American online retailer with ~1,500 employees. Owned by Amazon.) These four are often mentioned as having 'departed radically from formal hierarchies' and having 'eliminated the role of middle-management completely'. They also have been labelled in different ways over the years: 'Non-hierarchical organizations' (by Herbst in 1976), 'Boss-less organizations' (by Puranam et al. in 2014), 'Self-managing organizations' (by Lee & Edmondson in 2015 So any more such companies and how do they work?
Corporate Rebels
They work very well - in theory, only. Which is why I left Valve running as fast as I could, to a place with actual managers and visible hierarchy. This kind of setup sounds so nice and tempting. Once you’re in it, you realise there are people who have far more power than others. It just takes a year to figure this out, and another year to realise you’re not part of this group. “Ex-Valve employee describes ruthless internal politics at 'self-organizing' companies” https://www.pcgamer.com/ex-valve-employee-describes-ruthless-industry-politics/
There are many positive reviews too!
Google tried it few years ago and it failed. Google it :)
No, it turned out employees themselves complained against this and they did a compromise.
They don’t work very well at scale or companies would be doing it already.
They don’t work. GitHub gave up waaaaaaaay before that number. It was horrible. Managerless feels code for it gave no idea what I’m doing’ and in GitHub’s case it showed.
Any examples of successes?
aka holacracy