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Where’s the list of awesome companies that succeed without managers?
by genghisjahn 7y ago
Where’s the list of awesome companies that succeed without managers?
- Retric 7y agoValve and other flat organizations arguably qualify. Various tiny small startups may qualify depending on what people mean by managers.
- groby_b 7y agoValve is, by all accounts, a toxic cesspit that's ruled by various influential cabals. They still have a hierarchy, they just aren't explicit about it. At least for Medium, "Holacracy" pretty much imploded. Zsppos switched from it to an internal marketplace - which is, oddly, controlled by excecutives. Flat organizations beyond a certain size either move away from flatness officially, create unacknowledged hierarchy, or fail. I'm really not aware of a single large-scale example that still works. This is much different for small orgs - there's something about org size that requires some sort of centralization. (I think it's communications overhead + complexity exceeding the limit of what a single person can keep in their mind. I'm not 100% convinced, but these are the pressure points I usually see)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Retric 7y agoThe video game sector is unstable and toxic. IMO, Valve compares favorably to other video game companies as for one thing it’s still in business. Flat organizations are unusual, but survive about as well as other similar organizations. The difference is when a giant reorganization/buyout etc hits, they more obviously change into something else.
- xmprt 7y agoValve is the only one that I've heard of but without manager there need to be a lot of internal politics to get your work done.
- optimiz3 7y agoHas Valve done anything noteworthy in the last 10 years besides milking the Steam store? Their half-baked console seemed like an attempt to do more of the former.
- jchw 7y agoI know you are trying to be snarky but Valve has accomplished a hell of a lot more than most startups ever will. They are far from perfect (hell, they’re known for bugs and their famously poor timelines, and I heard their game Artifact was not good,) but it’s pretty bizarre to suggest they do nothing. Maintaining Steam alone is huge. It’s hard to find a platform with more vigorous fanboys for good reason. But that all aside... I mean they have a new Half Life game on the near term horizon (later this month apparently) and they have done a ton of work on VR and Linux support.
- Smaug123 7y agoFascinating article by Zvi (a very accomplished Magic: the Gathering player) about Artifact. https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/10/08/artifact-what-went-wrong/ https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/10/08/artifact-what-went-w... Summary: the game was brilliant ("uniquely amazing") if you were really good at it but was essentially impossible to get into, and its economy was badly constructed.
- dang 7y agoDiscussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21199134 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21199134 a few months ago.
- optimiz3 7y agoSteam has a run rate in the billions! Maintaining something that strong that was built before the last decade is a significant innovation? Most Startups are at least trying to change the status quo.
- dclusin 7y agoHard to find for sure. There was a time though when we didn't pay CEO's & professional managers 500x as much as the lowest paid employee. When we did that we still managed to go to the moon, split the atom, develop computers, create antibiotics, and lots of other neat things.
- cactus2093 7y agoAll of the examples you listed are either NASA or academic research, don't see what that has to do with CEO pay.
- bosma 7y agoDo you have evidence for your assertion? Of what significance is the ratio of highest to lowest paid employee? Shareholders of a particular company pay CEOs, not whoever "we" is. Here is evidence that claim CEOs produce more value than they are compensated for (i.e. they are underpaid): https://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/steven.kaplan/research/kceo.pdf https://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/steven.kaplan/research/kceo... https://econpapers.repec.org/article/inmormnsc/v_3a60_3ay_3a2014_3ai_3a12_3ap_3a2994-3010.htm https://econpapers.repec.org/article/inmormnsc/v_3a60_3ay_3a... https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1686068 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1686068
- ahkurtz 7y agoProducing more value than you are compensated for ... hmmm what does that sound like? You could say it sounds like the human condition. Which employees in the pyramid do you think have the worst scalar here?
- bosma 7y agoThe CEO's, it's pretty clear.
- Aeolun 7y agoThis may be true for CEO’s turning dysfunctional companies around on personal authority, but I find it hard to believe for companies that are already running perfectly well.
- nekeo0 7y agoI have yet to encounter a manager who motivates me to get up and find a way to eat that day. Just because they are there doesn’t mean the achievements are due to them. There have been a number of attempts, tens of millions of dollars spent on one study alone, trying to quantify what technologies and people generate value. The meta-conclusion considering all the studies I know of (traveling and not looking them up), is the math becomes so Byzantine it’s a pointless measure and we should just stick with ideology to avoid blowing up society in people’s minds (an idea that was peddled for thousands of years already, reaffirmed by math, glad we spent the time on it.) Just because we’ve emotionally conditioned ourselves to engage our mechanical agency towards these ends does not imply it’s because of management. Manufactured consent is a thing.
- odshoifsdhfs 7y agoWould be really interested on this paper. When you have time, if you can, mind linking to it?
- santoshalper 7y agoWhat a pile of pretentious bullshit.
- nekeo0 7y agoYeah, well that’s just like... your opinion, man. Not a very interesting one. Par for the course online.
- lesdeuxmagots 7y agoHm. Allocating credit for achievements is a tricky thing. Management is necessary to allocate resources (including labor) efficiently at scale, but it comes with overhead. As such, at smaller companies, startups, small businesses, the overhead of management can be outsized, the pain felt acutely when compared relatively to the actual output of ICs and such. At larger companies, the massive cadre of management which is necessary to keep the machine running is also very obvious, as the overhead of a large organization is very large, even if the management itself is excellent and highly efficient. As such... How does one allocate credit? An analogy would be like financing or investment. Necessary. A filtering mechanism. Sometimes helpful in an advisory mechanism. But are they the ones creating output? No. But do they deserve some credit? If something cannot be done without it, then they must deserve SOME credit, it's just a question of how much.
- AlchemistCamp 7y agoEarly Google. It worked for quite a while, but hit scaling limits. Github made it all the way until 2014 (and was a massive success by then) too, IIRC.
- acdha 7y ago“without” is the wrong word: you need managers but they need to have incentives which align with the actual business and accountability. Most companies have problems with at least one of the two, which is a loss but usually indirect enough that it's easy to excuse or deflect.
- lazyier 7y agoAny small business, really. This is what 'agile' is supposed to emulate for larger businesses.
- papito 7y agoYou mean the companies where executives use extensive corporate speak and pull deadlines out of their asses, without checking in with the experts on the ground, triggering office heroics down in the trenches. We'll do it - we all get rent to pay. Yeah, you can fake through it more than half of the time, comfortably. Just be eloquent, tall, and loud.
- a1369209993 7y agoI don't know, where's the list of people who are healthy without disease-causing bacteria? (Have you washed your hands today?)