6 ms·

Are Bosses Necessary? A radical experiment at Zappos

52 points by gpresot 11y ago

mattlutze 11y ago
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 11y ago
  That was a good article, I thought. The process to get yourself a raise sounds ridiculous.
Phemist 11y ago
This seems very similar to Valve's boss-free "flat" structure - http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...
- moonshinefe 11y ago
  Indeed the article briefly mentions Valve.
moonshinefe 11y ago
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.
- leoedin 11y ago
  I think this really hits the nail on the head. Hierarchies are human nature, and if you don't have explicit, well defined ones then you will end up with murkier and less defined ones. The biggest difference being that forcefulness of personality has much more of an impact on informal hierarchies than formal ones. It sounds great, but I wouldn't be surprised if they'll end up with all sorts of informal fiefdoms. What do you do when your informal boss is abusing their power? How do you take action to remove power from someone who never officially had it?
- Menge 11y ago
  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.
mrmondo 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
otis_inf 11y ago
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'. ;)
- mvitorino 11y ago
  Absolutely agree, it is against human nature. Everyone has a boss, whether they think of them as a boss or not, is something entirely different.
  - paulojreis 11y ago
    Can you add a source for the "human nature" argument?
    - mvitorino 11y ago
      I could point to the 20.000 years of human history and challenge you to find the opposite: a single completely flat organisation/enterprise with more than one individual, that for a non trivial amount of time exhibited progress, growth and financial success. I can't think of one.
      - 11y ago
bobjordan 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    OK, there's an entirely different problem. Who is responsible for fixing the problem if not the guy's boss?
    - UK-AL 11y ago
      The infrastructure team?
      - michaelt 11y ago
        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.
hrnnnnnn 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      > 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.
rkwasny 11y ago
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-frozen-for-two-years-as-it-integrates-with-a.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2015/10/7/zapposs-website-fr...
evolve2k 11y ago
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=1444302659&sr=81&pi=SY200_QL40&keywords=we+the+people+sociocracy&dpPl=1&dpID=51GeMtGtfCL&ref=plSrch http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0979282705/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=...) [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 11y ago
  > 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.
k__ 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
Glench 11y ago
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.
mattlutze 11y ago
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.

52 points by gpresot 11y ago

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 11y ago
That was a good article, I thought. The process to get yourself a raise sounds ridiculous.

Phemist 11y ago

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

moonshinefe 11y ago
Indeed the article briefly mentions Valve.

moonshinefe 11y ago

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.

leoedin 11y ago
I think this really hits the nail on the head. Hierarchies are human nature, and if you don't have explicit, well defined ones then you will end up with murkier and less defined ones. The biggest difference being that forcefulness of personality has much more of an impact on informal hierarchies than formal ones. It sounds great, but I wouldn't be surprised if they'll end up with all sorts of informal fiefdoms. What do you do when your informal boss is abusing their power? How do you take action to remove power from someone who never officially had it?
Menge 11y ago
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.

mrmondo 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.

otis_inf 11y ago

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'. ;)

mvitorino 11y ago
Absolutely agree, it is against human nature. Everyone has a boss, whether they think of them as a boss or not, is something entirely different.
- paulojreis 11y ago
  Can you add a source for the "human nature" argument?
  - mvitorino 11y ago
    I could point to the 20.000 years of human history and challenge you to find the opposite: a single completely flat organisation/enterprise with more than one individual, that for a non trivial amount of time exhibited progress, growth and financial success. I can't think of one.
    - 11y ago

bobjordan 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  OK, there's an entirely different problem. Who is responsible for fixing the problem if not the guy's boss?
  - UK-AL 11y ago
    The infrastructure team?
    - michaelt 11y ago
      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.

hrnnnnnn 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    > 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.

rkwasny 11y ago

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

evolve2k 11y ago

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=1444302659&sr=81&pi=SY200_QL40&keywords=we+the+people+sociocracy&dpPl=1&dpID=51GeMtGtfCL&ref=plSrch http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0979282705/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=...) [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 11y ago
> 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.

k__ 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.

Glench 11y ago

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.

mattlutze 11y ago

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.