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Highly hierarchical, "top-down" organizations end up requiring a lot of managers in order to "enact" the top down policy decisions. The more decisions are impos

Highly hierarchical, "top-down" organizations end up requiring a lot of managers in order to "enact" the top down policy decisions. The more decisions are imposed top-down instead of bottom up, the more management and administrative overhead you incur. Management is needed for top-down decisions because you need someone to "convince" teams to do something for you. Ideally, it's obvious to employees that the change is good and necessary, but if it's not, then this coercement requires enforcement - hence more management. The opposite end of the spectrum is "flat" orgs, like Valve software, who have few/no managers. In a flat org, all decisions are bottom up.

Galxeagle 5y ago
And just to defend top-down orgs a bit, the corollary is that because different teams might make different decisions, flat/bottom-up organizations tend to be less standardized - more flexible at the cost of some chaos. A tendency for launching and killing products in quick succession is one possible implication. For Valve launching different games that works, at Google launching/killing chat apps is starting to hurt their reputation. An ideal company is a mix of both, but which policies are ‘imposed from above’ and which are allowed to ‘boil up from the bottom’ is usually an endless source of discussion - I wonder which way Intel is going
- ethbr0 5y ago
  > An ideal company is a mix of both The best company I've ever worked at (retail, surprisingly) squared the circle thusly: Strategy (i.e. goals, culture, priorities) flowed top-down. And the company spent serious time doing it pervasively and well. Solutions (i.e. implementations, features, products) flowed bottom-up. Part of their corporate culture was that a manager above team level should never suggest how to do something. You could bounce ideas off them, but they were pretty serious about it being the person doing the implementation work's decision.
  - ketzo 5y ago
    Wow, that seems like a really strong set of guiding principles. I like that a lot.
varjag 5y ago
What is "bottom up" exactly if as you say there is no hierarchy?
geofft 5y ago
I used to work for a flat organization, with few formal managers. I now work for a much "taller" organization, with four levels of management between myself and the owner. In practice, at the flat organization, there were ways that the people at the top were able to impose their views and preferences on the company. Most obviously, the folks who had been at the company for a long time were friends with the owners, and they had a lot of unofficial influence over things went, even if there was no org chart putting them over other people. If a change seemed good and necessary to the in-group, then they were in a position to enforce it. If it did not, there was no way to get them to go along with it. Also, in practice, at the taller organization, there are a lot of bottom-up decisions anyway. It's just that those decisions get to be in fact bottom up - I go to my manager, who talks to some other manager while I keep hacking on something else, and either that manager agrees, or more likely they point out something else and my manager comes back to me with a more balanced alternative. At the flat organization, decisions were bottom sideways. I had to go to a bunch of ICs from different teams and try to convince them of the merits of some idea, and if they had conflicting goals, I had to mediate that myself. I'm much happier at the taller organization which has a paperwork-heavy performance review and promotion process (compared to the flat organization, which also had no titles and where performance reviews were a brief closed-door meeting with the one manager between you and the owners). I find it works better for me: I understand better other people's expectations of me and I am better able to communicate what I want to change too. It's extra time, but it's well worth it for the predictability, and I feel much more supported trying to make difficult cross-team changes. It doesn't work for everyone, of course; different people have different personalities.
Guthur 5y ago
I can pretty much guarantee Valve has hierarchy it just maybe more implicit than an overt org chart. There will be leaders and there will be followers, almost guaranteed. Hierarchy will naturally appear in some form as we try to achieve something that requires more than handful, I'm sure there is some sort of inflexion point but not sure exactly what that is.
rdtwo 5y ago
You sort of need top down after a certain point. Buttons up fails pretty badly when there are multiple sites and nobody can agree on the right way to do anything so there are no common tools or processes even though the sites may be making very similar products

Galxeagle 5y ago

And just to defend top-down orgs a bit, the corollary is that because different teams might make different decisions, flat/bottom-up organizations tend to be less standardized - more flexible at the cost of some chaos. A tendency for launching and killing products in quick succession is one possible implication. For Valve launching different games that works, at Google launching/killing chat apps is starting to hurt their reputation. An ideal company is a mix of both, but which policies are ‘imposed from above’ and which are allowed to ‘boil up from the bottom’ is usually an endless source of discussion - I wonder which way Intel is going

ethbr0 5y ago
> An ideal company is a mix of both The best company I've ever worked at (retail, surprisingly) squared the circle thusly: Strategy (i.e. goals, culture, priorities) flowed top-down. And the company spent serious time doing it pervasively and well. Solutions (i.e. implementations, features, products) flowed bottom-up. Part of their corporate culture was that a manager above team level should never suggest how to do something. You could bounce ideas off them, but they were pretty serious about it being the person doing the implementation work's decision.
- ketzo 5y ago
  Wow, that seems like a really strong set of guiding principles. I like that a lot.

varjag 5y ago

What is "bottom up" exactly if as you say there is no hierarchy?

geofft 5y ago

I used to work for a flat organization, with few formal managers. I now work for a much "taller" organization, with four levels of management between myself and the owner. In practice, at the flat organization, there were ways that the people at the top were able to impose their views and preferences on the company. Most obviously, the folks who had been at the company for a long time were friends with the owners, and they had a lot of unofficial influence over things went, even if there was no org chart putting them over other people. If a change seemed good and necessary to the in-group, then they were in a position to enforce it. If it did not, there was no way to get them to go along with it. Also, in practice, at the taller organization, there are a lot of bottom-up decisions anyway. It's just that those decisions get to be in fact bottom up - I go to my manager, who talks to some other manager while I keep hacking on something else, and either that manager agrees, or more likely they point out something else and my manager comes back to me with a more balanced alternative. At the flat organization, decisions were bottom sideways. I had to go to a bunch of ICs from different teams and try to convince them of the merits of some idea, and if they had conflicting goals, I had to mediate that myself. I'm much happier at the taller organization which has a paperwork-heavy performance review and promotion process (compared to the flat organization, which also had no titles and where performance reviews were a brief closed-door meeting with the one manager between you and the owners). I find it works better for me: I understand better other people's expectations of me and I am better able to communicate what I want to change too. It's extra time, but it's well worth it for the predictability, and I feel much more supported trying to make difficult cross-team changes. It doesn't work for everyone, of course; different people have different personalities.

Guthur 5y ago

I can pretty much guarantee Valve has hierarchy it just maybe more implicit than an overt org chart. There will be leaders and there will be followers, almost guaranteed. Hierarchy will naturally appear in some form as we try to achieve something that requires more than handful, I'm sure there is some sort of inflexion point but not sure exactly what that is.

rdtwo 5y ago

You sort of need top down after a certain point. Buttons up fails pretty badly when there are multiple sites and nobody can agree on the right way to do anything so there are no common tools or processes even though the sites may be making very similar products