> Let’s imagine that we start a company by sticking 20 people in an office with an ill-defined but ambitious goal and no further leadership. We tell them we’ll

> Let’s imagine that we start a company by sticking 20 people in an office with an ill-defined but ambitious goal and no further leadership. We tell them we’ll pay them as long as they’re there, working. We come back two months later to find that five of them have quit, five are sleeping with each other, and the other ten have no idea how to solve the litany of problems that have arisen. The employees are certainly not much closer to the goal laid out for them. The whole enterprise just sort of falls apart. Is that true? I mean, it sounds intuitively appealing (especially if you fancy yourself a boss-type) but has anyone actually done this experiment? Maybe some of those 20 people are ambitious and take it upon themselves to lead the project, maybe they all form a self-organizing collective and make sensible decisions by consensus, maybe they hold a vote to elect a de facto CEO...