No. You need a leader. A flat structure will eventually create problems. And they will be hard to solve. Or you could lose a good chunk of the team due to th

No. You need a leader. A flat structure will eventually create problems. And they will be hard to solve. Or you could lose a good chunk of the team due to the lack of direction and management. The following will not be perfect analogs, I offer them as thinking tools: 8 seat rowing shell: It's hard to think of a better example of a small group of people with a well-defined purpose who train hard and execute hard towards that goal. Yet, the boat has NINE people on it. The ninth peeson is there to keep the team going in the right direction and at the right pace. A leader is important and he/she does not have to be dictatorial to be effective. The second example is more of a homework exercise: Watch a dozen (or more) episodes of "Kitchen Nightmares" with Gordon Ramsay. Think about the most common issues leading to failure. Write a one page note advising your team on how to avoid failure. The third and final is also homework: Watch a dozen (or more) episodes of "The Profit" with Marcus Lemonis and write a short conclusion as above. Business isn't hard if you understand there are commonalities between making burgers, manufacturing baseball bats and, yes, making software. At the core they are the same. Above that they have specialized processes that are aligned with what the business is about. The operating approach between knowledge workers and assembly line workers naturally diverges in a lot of areas. Think of it as the OS kernel versus abstraction layers above it. The same kernel functions are pretty much required in order to build a successful system. That's where you start. Same with business.