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I think you and a few others are selling Valve and the article a little short. Varoufakis does give a precise definition of what he means by non-hierarchical:
by gruseom 14y ago
I think you and a few others are selling Valve and the article a little short. Varoufakis does give a precise definition of what he means by non-hierarchical: free allocation of individual time. How is that not a radical innovation? Nearly every other corporation is a tyranny by comparison. And it's not just that they happened to hire people who work this way. It was clearly a conscious design decision and probably couldn't have gotten started any other way.
(BTW, I don't think you can have an "informal and spontaneous" hierarchy, or a "flat" one. Those are oxymorons. Hierarchy by definition is a formal gradation of ranks. No?)
Varoufakis is careful to distinguish this management structure from Valve's ownership structure, which is hierarchical. Many people have pointed out that ultimately there has to be a boss at Valve: the owner. He implies this too when he points out that its management structure depends on the "enlightenment" of the owners "not using their property rights to boss people around". So yes, whatever this experiment is, it isn't communism. That doesn't mean it isn't radical! I think we're hypnotized a bit by having been raised with "capitalism" and "communism" as the only two poles of a binary system, where communism was an obvious failure so therefore the status quo is the only possibility... (not implying that this is your view, just that it's in our water). Besides which it's not obvious that Valve's structure is anti-capitalist. The way Varoufakis describes it, it's an extension and generalization of capitalism: extension because market dynamics are being applied to what has traditionally been monolithic bureaucracy; generalization because something other than price – namely, time – is being used inside Valve to signal value. (Anti-corporatist, sure. And yay! But I digress.)
Ownership must have an impact on how the company functions, so there are unanswered questions here. But let's not naively assume that ownership trumps everything. Suppose the owners decided tomorrow, "We tire of this experiment. The experiment is hereby changed to neo-Stalinism." Would people at Valve glumly bow their heads and say, "oh, ok"? Likely not. Some would leave; others would resist. It's not clear what would happen. So yes, vertical ownership does imply power - but not absolute power, except perhaps to destroy the whole thing.
Seems to me the big unanswered questions are: (1) relation of ownership and management structures, (2) how hiring and firing really work. The latter is the most important use of management power, so it's the big test of how non-hierarchically Valve really operates. Especially firing. No matter how good their "filters for self-motivated people" are, they can't be perfect. When firing is necessary, how is it really done? A lot of people seem to be imagining that it must work like this: you get called into Gabe's office and Gabe says, "we're not that anarcho-syndicalist, you're fired." That would indeed be hierarchical. But we don't know this. And even if it were true, it wouldn't completely destroy the experiment.
I don't think their claims are quite as utopian as some of the more cynical/debunking commenters assume. Thinking about this as "utopia or not" makes it less interesting.
- mhartl 14y agoI don't think you can have an "informal and spontaneous" hierarchy, or a "flat" one. Those are oxymorons. Hierarchy by definition is a formal gradation of ranks. No? Humans naturally form dominance hierarchies even in the absence of formal rank. If Alice, Bob, and Charlie all work together on a project, typically one of them (say Alice) will quickly emerge as group leader. She will act (if necessary) with executive authority, even in the absence of the formal ability to hire and fire. A "flat" organization is simply one that has few formal hierarchical levels. There is no essential conflict with a strict hierarchy. An army with one general and ten-thousand privates is both flat and perfectly hierarchical. Real militaries find it advisable to have a large number of formal ranks, but the essential notions of unified command and strict hierarchy are common to any well-managed corporation.
- gruseom 14y ago"General" and "private"? That's two levels, not flat. But ok, so we're obviously using our terms differently. There is still a radical difference between an organization with fixed hierarchical roles and one in which individuals allocate their own time and respect only such authority as emerges during the work itself. There's another point. In my experience with emergent authority on teams, even if Alice emerges as group leader, that hardly gives her "executive authority". If she begins to insist on making arbitrary decisions, she will soon be knocked down a peg and carry less respect. In other words, these forms of authority (emergent vs. executive) are not the same.
- mhartl 14y agoI'm using "flat" in the standard sense: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_organization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_organization
- _delirium 14y agoThey're somewhat separate, but there is substantial emphasis in current management research on trying to blur them. The worry is that classic executive authority looks increasingly heavy-handed, but the executives still want control. So the goal is to design a workplace such that they get what they want while appearing not to be in hierarchical control. That's a bit difficult since it involves solving a "reverse emergence" problem: how do I set up my workplace so that the emergent authority will tend to emerge in the ways that I want it to? This can involve all sorts of subtle and less-subtle levers: hiring practices, office layouts, perks, "gamification", performance reviews, promotions, etc.