Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh: Adopt Holacracy Or Leave • Hacker News Board

Re: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh: Adopt Holacracy Or Leave

#71

Post by a3n » Fri, Apr 24, 2015, 3:27 PM UTC

smackfu wrote: post #32

coldpie wrote: post #31

I've only worked for small companies. My current company has roughly 30 employees. My eyes glazed over during the 2nd paragraph. Is this what it's like when you have a lot of employees to manage? Sending Half-Hour Emails with Capitalized Words I've never heard of? Holacracy? Glass Frog? Teal Organization? Reinventing Organizations? Huh? Just let me do my work, damn.

In a typical management structure, sending out org-wide emails is often a sign of bad management, since management is not trusting their lower tiers of management to get their message out and is essentially acting like the voice of god. In a holocracy, who knows.

I imagine these emails are going to have to come almost exclusively from Hsieh, as one of the few remaining formal managers.

Re: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh: Adopt Holacracy Or Leave

#72

Post by a3n » Fri, Apr 24, 2015, 3:29 PM UTC

vanadium wrote: post #70

slowernet wrote: post #43

Based on the "adapt or get out" tone and unironic use of jargon like "Teal Organization", I picture their emergent culture landing somewhere between Lord of the Flies and Scientology.

Sounds like a case for some "Tension Processing."

I don't even know what that is, and I already know what it is. Been working too long I guess.

Re: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh: Adopt Holacracy Or Leave

#73

Post by a3n » Fri, Apr 24, 2015, 3:35 PM UTC

mfringel wrote: post #57

While my eyebrows are raised past the top of my hairline right now, kudos to him for giving it a shot at a large scale. Whatever the outcome, it's going to be a very interesting case study.

I'm glad I'm not a subject of the experiment.

Re: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh: Adopt Holacracy Or Leave

#74

Post by a3n » Fri, Apr 24, 2015, 3:37 PM UTC

bozoclownn wrote: post #18

jcrites wrote: post #3

Similar ideas are expressed in Valve's Corporate Handbook, which describes a company culture where there is no hierarchy, either: https://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes....

There is always a hierarchy. Either it is explicit or it is implicit (which does not mean I'm pro explicit hierarchies)

Yeah, and the problem with implicit hierarchies is that people are always wondering who has the power today. It's like the Roman Senate.

Re: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh: Adopt Holacracy Or Leave

#75

Post by angrow » Fri, Apr 24, 2015, 3:45 PM UTC

maxxxxx wrote: post #68

How do salary raises get decided under this system? To me it looks like he wants to have top management, a few superstars, and the rest of the company are totally interchangeable. Does your salary get reduced when you change roles?

Holacracy is not a system for determining salary, or any specific tactical question, in the same way that "Agile" isn't a system for determining what programming language to use. Holacracy just says how an organization can decide how to apportion responsibility and authority. Different organizations reach compensation decisions in a wide variety of ways, no matter their meta-organizational framework.

Commonly, salaries are decided in a way very similar to the process at a "normal" company.

> To me it looks like he wants to have top management, a few superstars, and the rest of the company are totally interchangeable.

As I said, not much different.

Re: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh: Adopt Holacracy Or Leave

#76

Post by wmeredith » Fri, Apr 24, 2015, 3:48 PM UTC

coldpie wrote: post #31

I've only worked for small companies. My current company has roughly 30 employees. My eyes glazed over during the 2nd paragraph. Is this what it's like when you have a lot of employees to manage? Sending Half-Hour Emails with Capitalized Words I've never heard of? Holacracy? Glass Frog? Teal Organization? Reinventing Organizations? Huh? Just let me do my work, damn.

If you'd like further bait your creeping nausea, do a little research on Holocracy...

"Adopting Holacracy isn't cheap or easy. The system has its own set of rules and lingo, and is complicated to implement. The Holacracy parent company, HolacracyOne, helps companies transition by offering consulting services that run from $50,000 to $500,000, depending on how long it takes to achieve self-sufficiency. Even for much smaller companies, like Medium, which implemented Holacracy when it was just a couple dozen people in 2012, the journey takes multiple years and has a steep learning curve.

Holacracy was invented by Brian Robertson, a 35-year-old former programmer with barely any management experience. He created Holacracy in 2007 because he had a "burning sense that there has to be a better way to work together," he said in an interview with Fast Company. Robertson, who describes himself as a coding savant, says he taught himself to program at age 6..."

Re: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh: Adopt Holacracy Or Leave

#77

Post by _delirium » Fri, Apr 24, 2015, 4:00 PM UTC

talmand wrote: post #53

maxwell wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holacracy® replaces single, static titles and departments with multiple, dynamic roles and circles. He's probably the "Lead Link" of the "General Company Circle", e.g. https://glassfrog.holacracy.org/circles/25

So his static job title changes from "Chief Executive Officer" to "Lead Link of General Company Circle"? Can someone else step up and replace him as Lead Link? If not, doesn't seem very dynamic.

Sounds a little bit like the theory behind some communist parties' organization. Instead of a strict hierarchy, with leadership titles like Chairman or President and such, there are functional working groups or committees ("circles") with possibly intersecting membership. Then people have functional roles in those committees. The idea being that you aren't at a certain "rank" in the organization, but rather you are doing something specific in a specific sub-group of it.

It does have the problem you mention, that the leadership in practice will often end up not very dynamic. There's no leader, but the "lead link" of some particularly important "circle" will de facto be the leader of the organization, even if their official title is only something like Secretary.

Re: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh: Adopt Holacracy Or Leave

#78

Post by corysama » Fri, Apr 24, 2015, 4:14 PM UTC

coldpie wrote: post #31

I've only worked for small companies. My current company has roughly 30 employees. My eyes glazed over during the 2nd paragraph. Is this what it's like when you have a lot of employees to manage? Sending Half-Hour Emails with Capitalized Words I've never heard of? Holacracy? Glass Frog? Teal Organization? Reinventing Organizations? Huh? Just let me do my work, damn.

When it's just you and a couple dozen other people, just letting you do your work is a pretty safe bet. But, when its you and a few hundred or a few thousand highly variable people, just letting you do your work has a strong risk of setting you up for failure. Somebody in that huge mass of people is going to screw up your work by running full speed in the wrong direction. That somebody might be you -not out of incompetence, but because you were mis/uninformed.

So, how can I repeatedly communicate dense ideas about how to keep hundreds of people aligned in dozens of dimensions using only extremely low-bandwidth channels such as weekly emails? One option is to use shared-dictionary compression in the form of a custom vocabulary of capitalized words. Of course, the messages will be inscrutable to anyone outside the org because they won't have the dictionary. But, that's not my concern.

Re: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh: Adopt Holacracy Or Leave

#79

Post by gknoy » Fri, Apr 24, 2015, 4:43 PM UTC

a3n wrote: post #72

vanadium wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a case for some "Tension Processing."

I don't even know what that is, and I already know what it is. Been working too long I guess.

Reading the Holacracy page on "processing tensions" [0] feels like document written by Dogbert. Poe's law resonates so strongly here that had I not known that this was for real (since there's a book, and Zappo's is doing it), I would have thought it was satirical.

I feel like I need to read it three times, and still it feels like mumbo-jumbo.

0: http://holacracy.org/blog/processing-tensions

Re: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh: Adopt Holacracy Or Leave

#80

Post by ryanobjc » Fri, Apr 24, 2015, 4:47 PM UTC

When I saw a missive which is commanded to take 30 minutes to read... my immediate thought is, ok they're doomed.

Every book on business management and communications repeats the "keep it simple and clear" over and over. Considering the words of the CEO are repeated by dozens if not hundreds of people, you don't want the message to shift.

I read the article about holocracy, and frankly anything that is described as "difficult" and "painful to transition" and "takes years" just seems like it better delivers huge benefits. And from the origin stories of holocracy, I have my suspects of why.

In the end, management is all about human dynamics. All the advantages and disadvantages of being human. You have to lean in to the advantages and minimize the disadvantages.

I would probably be net negative on holocracy for my own consideration however.