Valve 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 leas

Valve 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)