This is really a good essay and surely deserves a high profile, but it's disappointing that it, and some bits of angst about Valve's internal situation, seem to

This is really a good essay and surely deserves a high profile, but it's disappointing that it, and some bits of angst about Valve's internal situation, seem to be the only discussions of organisational structure that get widely shared these days. Back from about the '70s to the early '90s it seems that there was quite a lot of management-theory/theory-of-the-firm research into different organisational structures and how they affected innovation, ability to change and other desirable or undesirable characteristics of organisations. And it didn't just stay hidden in academia, as the results got a fair amount of coverage in newsmagazines and the like in the early '90s. (Which is how I heard about it: I'm no expert.) As you might expect, the findings on relatively "structureless" orgs seem to have been pretty compatible with Freeman's observations. But there was also research on many other unusual forms of structure and hierarchy, for example the "matrix management" which famously got implemented at Dow Chemical in the 1970s https://hbr.org/1978/05/problems-of-matrix-organizations https://hbr.org/1978/05/problems-of-matrix-organizations . But for some reason interest and attention seems to have completely faded out, at least at the popular level, by about 2000 or so. So the Valve situation gets reported on as if it's some kind of unprecedented novelty, and not an example of a sort of situation whose outcomes had been hashed out pretty thoroughly a decade or more earlier.