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Comment by kabdib | Hacker News Reader

The Zappos Holacracy documents I read were nuts. Bad, batshit crazy. "Tensions" and "next-actions" and "accountabilities" and Policies and Domains and . . . the Holacracy Constitution reads like they were going for flat, but freaked out and decided to obfuscate a power structure after all. The Glassfrog documents are the hesitation marks of ditching a hierarchy. It's like they want people to execute a script rather than actually do work. At its core, Glassfrog is afraid of itself.

Try some of the documentation here: http://www.holacracy.org/constitution#art1

(Oh, and it looks like there are companies that will consult with you and help you move to a Holocracy. Big surprise).

I work in an org that is flat. There's none of that nonsense. You don't need it. You really don't.

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The documentation reminds me of one of my favorite quotes:

"Consultants invent these kinds of phrases to label things we’ve all known all along—it’s a perversion of business life that fancy words always cost more than plain ones, even though the plain ones are more valuable."

From Agile Development with Rails, 4th edition.

> From Agile Development...

I assume the irony is intentional?

Thanks for the laughs for the day. Even as a Rails Dev I've been wary of those calling themselves as Agile Consultants.

The Agile in question refers to the made up customer (in the book) who asks for changes and features on the go by walking by your desk. It's a good book.

"Agile" is a plain english word.

This is why I never advertise myself as a freelancer. I'm a "consultant". Same job, more money.

I guess they never bothered to read Valve's employee handbook.[0]

While Valve isn't perfect either, their system appears positively utopian when contrast with Holacracy.

[0] http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...

Valve's is one of the systems that inspired the creator of Holocracy.

holocracy is crass attempt to trademark, obfuscated, and cash in on Valve's (and others) management style.

I didn't say otherwise.

I though it was a way to trademark and cash in on the practice of Sociocracy, which dates from the 19th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociocracy

Wow. That reads like some misguided cult text.

I interviewed there in 2008, well before the Holacracy movement. Tony, while clearly brilliant, seemed to have some sort of "reality distortion field" surrounding him.

The interview process is pretty intense, so I talked to a lot of people there. They mostly seemed aligned on their opinions of what was working well, what wasn't, etc. None of their opinions matched what I heard from Tony.

I have to imagine then, that this Holacracy experiment, as implemented at Zappos, must have been even more bizarre than it seems generically.

How many people are in your organization?

Curious about this and also how to implement flat orgs.

Profile lists employer...so, probably on the order of several hundred.

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