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How Medium Is Building a New Kind of Company with No Managers

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Re: How Medium Is Building a New Kind of Company with No Managers

#21
post #7

Several comments on the thread seem to not have read the article. Specifically: while they do not have "traditional people managers", they have people they call "Lead Links" and "Domain Leads" who take on management roles. It seems many are reading the title of the article and imagining a utopian experiment in total anarchy.

Giving managers titles that don't have the word "manager" in them doesn't mean that there aren't managers. Describing their responsibilities as being "mentor"-like rather than "managerial" doesn't mean they aren't, in fact, managing. The headline is rather explicitly stating that Medium is building a company with "no managers," and then the article goes on to describe some rather transparently bad attempts at euphemi…

The article doesn't do a great job conveying how Medium is actually structured. I can only speak to how it was a year and a half ago (when I left), but the difference between a system like Holacracy and a standard hierarchical organization is that a person in Holacracy might hold roles in many circles at the same time and those roles are relatively fluid.

The whole point in a role is to define who has decision-making authority over some given thing and/or what that role is responsible for. Lead links come about when a role becomes too big for a single person and turns into a circle which has its own members. The lead link is there to represent the circle to the parent circle and to determine who is filling what roles. Other than that, the circle is largely self governing (roles, responsibilities, etc are all decided in regular governance meetings as a circle, not by the lead link).

There are definitely decision makers at the company, but they're not managing people per se, they just have authority over some area of the company. The whole people side is entirely independent and generally lives outside of Holacracy.

Re: How Medium Is Building a New Kind of Company with No Managers

#22
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gabe Newell is on line 3. Valve is famous for their flat organizational structure. At nearly 200 people and multi-billions in revenue, it can work. Ofc Valve does a lot more than a simple blog site.

Valve has also been called out by former employees for not being actually structureless. They don't have an official org chart, but there's an unofficial one at work anyways. Any sufficient large group of people will self-organize into hierarchies. A refusal to write it down doesn't prevent this from happening, it just means people are even less accountable for the position they occupy. "We believe in flatness" usual…

Ok, so this debate seems to be framed in terms of authoritarian bureaucracy vs. anarchy.

But what about corporate governance that has formal structure and rules, but is governed in a democratic rather than authoritarian fashion?

There are more than two dimensions to this. Structure does not necessitate top-down command, and vice versa.

Re: How Medium Is Building a New Kind of Company with No Managers

#25
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gabe Newell is on line 3. Valve is famous for their flat organizational structure. At nearly 200 people and multi-billions in revenue, it can work. Ofc Valve does a lot more than a simple blog site.

Valve has also been called out by former employees for not being actually structureless. They don't have an official org chart, but there's an unofficial one at work anyways. Any sufficient large group of people will self-organize into hierarchies. A refusal to write it down doesn't prevent this from happening, it just means people are even less accountable for the position they occupy. "We believe in flatness" usual…

The Circles approach they describe in this article feels pretty structured. It includes clear responsibilities and authorities. It's less clear who defines those responsibilities and authorities, but I'll assume it's "collaborative" – and specifically it's supposed to be well documented and internally public, so there is some implicit peer review.

Re: How Medium Is Building a New Kind of Company with No Managers

#26
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve has also been called out by former employees for not being actually structureless. They don't have an official org chart, but there's an unofficial one at work anyways. Any sufficient large group of people will self-organize into hierarchies. A refusal to write it down doesn't prevent this from happening, it just means people are even less accountable for the position they occupy. "We believe in flatness" usual…

Yet another chance to call out the highly relevant essay "The Tyranny of Structurelessness": http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm It should be required reading for anyone pushing the "we don't need managers" line.

It's worth pointing out that the author was a Stalinist, and so thought the solution to the problem of hierarchies forming implicitly was to make those hierarchies explicit and enshrine them.

The article describes a real problem; it speaks to my experience and the experiences of my comrades; but it offers no real solution and is essentially a defense of the status quo. It doesn't preclude a better solution.

Re: How Medium Is Building a New Kind of Company with No Managers

#27
post #9

The key takeaway from the article is that Medium is still under 50 people. At that size, any sort of hokum management style will probably work. Call me when you hit 200+.

Gabe Newell is on line 3. Valve is famous for their flat organizational structure. At nearly 200 people and multi-billions in revenue, it can work. Ofc Valve does a lot more than a simple blog site.

I've heard that Valve has horrific internal politics, though.

Re: How Medium Is Building a New Kind of Company with No Managers

#28
post #3

I don't quite buy it. I'll guarantee that there are figures who call the shots in the company, whether they are called "managers" or not.

Did you read beyond the headline? Pulled from the article he talks about this and pin points two ideas behind making decisions: 1. "Make everything explicit — from vacation policies to decision makers in each area." 2. "Distribute decision-making power and discourage consensus seeking."

Could you refine point two more?

I don't understand how you distribute decision making without consensus? In that scenario "leader" types would make the decisions for the group, right? And then it's not "distributed".

I guess I don't understand that point.

Re: How Medium Is Building a New Kind of Company with No Managers

#29
The idea of holacracy is interesting to me, but something tells me it's more about marketing than anything else. Holacracy seems to do the exact opposite of getting rid of managers. It's actually making everyone a manager of something.

And yet, it's billed as simply being a way of getting rid of managers. If that's all there is to Holacracy, then the entire idea is pointless. Reducing the layers of management is a means not an end.

Reductionism FTW.

Re: How Medium Is Building a New Kind of Company with No Managers

#30
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve has also been called out by former employees for not being actually structureless. They don't have an official org chart, but there's an unofficial one at work anyways. Any sufficient large group of people will self-organize into hierarchies. A refusal to write it down doesn't prevent this from happening, it just means people are even less accountable for the position they occupy. "We believe in flatness" usual…

Ok, so this debate seems to be framed in terms of authoritarian bureaucracy vs. anarchy. But what about corporate governance that has formal structure and rules, but is governed in a democratic rather than authoritarian fashion? There are more than two dimensions to this. Structure does not necessitate top-down command, and vice versa.

> "Ok, so this debate seems to be framed in terms of authoritarian bureaucracy vs. anarchy."

It isn't really. The observations surrounding structurelessness suggest that true anarchy is impossible. In the absence of some type of hierarchy one will emerge anyways. The notion of a group of true equals with no authority over one another is a pipe dream.

Not to mention the notion of defined hierarchies makes no statement on what the hierarchy looks like, nor the system that determines who goes where.

Corporate structures are frequently democratic. The Board of a company is very explicitly such a structure. Not to mention that even without explicit democratic structures managers still answer to those they have authority over due to market forces (nothing says "you suck as a manager" like your team quitting). In this industry in particular, it's very, very hard to build an authoritarian bureaucracy.

I'm not sure where you're getting the authoritarian/anarchy divide from, that wasn't in any way implied by my post, nor do I believe either extreme is possible in our industry.

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