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

You're talking about "participatory management". It was a fad in the 50s that comes up again from time to time. It sounds like a good idea, but it actually ends up increasing bureaucracy. There's a good article that discusses exactly what you're talking about here:

http://www.maccoby.com/CHeckscher/Articles/LimitsPartMgmt.sh...

As Jo Freeman once said:

"Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities, or intentions of the people involved. The very fact that we are individuals, with different talents, predispositions, and backgrounds makes this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any basis whatsoever could we approximate structurelessness -- and that is not the nature of a human group. This means that to strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an "objective" news story, "value-free" social science, or a "free" economy. A "laissez faire" group is about as realistic as a "laissez faire" society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of "structurelessness" does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones. Similarly "laissez faire" philosophy did not prevent the economically powerful from establishing control over wages, prices, and distribution of goods; it only prevented the government from doing so. Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power, and within the women's movement is usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful (whether they are conscious of their power or not). As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules. Those who do not know the rules and are not chosen for initiation must remain in confusion, or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of which they are not quite aware."

Her comments were aimed at the feminist movement of the 1970s, but her essay is universal and everyone can gain from reading it:

The Tyranny Of Structurelessness

http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

Valve always gets brought up as an example of a flat structure that works (and it already has been in this thread). Here's an interview with a former Valve hardware engineer describing how the system works in practice: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/195786/ExValve_hardware_e.... She likened the experience to high school, in terms of cliques that developed (which is about what you would expect). Her entire team got fired by Gabe Newell, which I kinda feel should answer any questions you have about whether there's actually a boss - whoever can tell you that you don't have a job tomorrow is in fact your boss, even if they don't want to acknowledge it. She agrees with what a lot of people have already said, that this works in small groups, but that it doesn't scale well.

Honestly, it sounded like a pretty crappy place to work, although she freely admits that she was bitter, and that it's very much a case of a disillusioned zealot. I've enjoyed working with most of the bosses I've had, and I've always thought that it's nice to have people who give you direction and quality feedback. I've had some really terrible bosses too, but the idea that since there are some bad bosses we should throw out the whole structure of management seems like a big over-reaction.

Personally, I think that structurelessness is much more possible in "our industry" because it's so culturally, racially, sexually, and class homogeneous. It's worth noting that this article is about feminist activist groups, and not software companies. Software companies have both much more clearly defined goals and much better metrics of measuring their progress towards those goals than feminist activist groups do. That in itself is a gamebreaking difference.

"It's crazy how, in our company that's entirely white dudes in their mid to late 20s, we don't really have many issues with sexual harassment, ageism, or racism. We've moved beyond those concerns!"