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Comment by sitkack | Hacker News Reader

I would be curious what others would recommend as management books or anything related to organizational psychology in this topic.

Books I can think of are

"Reinventing Organizations" by Frederic Laloux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinventing_Organizations

"Delivering Happiness" by Tony Hsieh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delivering_Happiness

https://hbr.org/2011/12/first-lets-fire-all-the-managers

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I find "Turn the Ship Around!" to be an interesting companion to this essay. It provides an excellent example of how, if you do it right, a well-defined structure can actually be quite empowering to people at all levels of the organization.

Speaking from personal experience, I've seen it myself at one previous employer. The clear hierarchy and delegation of ownership and responsibilities made it easier for everyone to get things done and enhanced everyone's sense of psychological safety. People explicitly knowing exactly what authority they do and do not have means they can make confident decisions without feeling the need to play wasteful and exhausting games of "mother may I" with the latent power structure for fear of accidentally stepping on influential toes.

Yeah, I think having clear agency boundaries is a key property for all organizations that aren't run like a dictatorship.

Here is a talk given by the author of "Turn the Ship Around!", David Marquet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzJL8zX3EVk

Seconding that book. It's one of several things that got me to realize that a lot of the problems I had seen with hierarchies were not fundamental to the idea of a hierarchy but rather functions of culture, practices and individuals.

It's also made me sad that finding teams that operate like that is really hard, and they often don't changes in management :( I had an absolutely amazing several years working on a team like that at Target of all places, until the broader Target culture caught up to us...

If you were willing to write a larger passage, I would sure appreciate your good experience at Target and what made it special relative to "Turn The Ship Around".

Here's one about the 'Semco Way' - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Maverick-Success-Behind-Unusual-Wor...

Semco, like Valve is a 'horizontal organisation' with a BDFL. The difference being that Semco is a massive organisation and employer operating across a range of industries.

Here's a quick read on the company - https://hatrabbits.com/en/ricardo-semler-does-things-differe...

Donella Meadows' "Leverage Points" (also a chapter in her book Thinking in Systems: A Primer), particularly the #1 one (transcending paradigms), addresses some aspects of this. To relate to this essay, freeing yourself from the idea that structurelessness is what you need, or a strict hierarchy at the other extreme, or anything in between. After that, you're free to actually develop and select good ideas and trial ideas without being constrained by your initial paradigm and the magical thinking associated with locking yourself into a paradigm.

In the software world, check out Weinberg's The Psychology of Computer Programming which touches on these ideas (more about how to look at and examine systems, not prescriptive). The book was more of a starting point (or intended as such) so it's hardly comprehensive, but he looks at various organizational approaches within software teams and where they work and fail.

https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-t...

Aaron Dignan's "Brave New Work" isn't particularly revolutionary, but synthesizes insights from Teal/Holacracy and other popular-but-hard-to-systematize org management stuff in a way that's very incremental and generally palatable for larger orgs. The Corporate Rebels blog (https://www.corporate-rebels.com/blog) has a lot of good content in this vein as well.

Teal hasn't really seemed to develop much except through outlets like Corporate Rebels, but IMO Holacracy has shown some real continued promise. The Zappos adoption had middling success over time (and while they're no longer practicing, their market-based model owes a lot to it), but overall Holacracy and the similar structure-heavy self-management stuff it has inspired is continuing to press on. It's not growing, but it's fairly steady. They released a new version of Holacracy a few years ago set up for "modular adoption" instead of all-at-once adoption, and I think it's a significant improvement.

My Years at General Motors by Alfred Sloan is one of the best, because he actually goes through several iterations of making the company more or less centralized, based on specific problems they had at the time and the best ways to solve them. So the reasoning ends up being much more nuanced than most pro-centralization or pro-decentralization books.

I can see how a little centralization at the right time can align teams. Something akin to an air traffic controller or mediator.

I'd recommend The Fractal Organization,[1] or any other about Viable System Models.[2]

This framework based on cybernetic science provides good heuristics to both understand and design complex social structures.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Fractal-Organization-Creating-sustain...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viable_system_model

I don't have particular books to share, but to me this is very close to group dynamics topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_dynamics

You can find Key Theorists section there with book recommendations.

Speaking of Gustave Le Bon, I just came across him in this new book on propaganda

Early Media Effects Theory & the Suggestion Doctrine https://www.mediastudies.press/pub/nb-early-media-effects/re...

Full pdf https://github.com/mediastudiespress/singles/releases/downlo...

Chapter 1 is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crowd:_A_Study_of_the_Popu...

I don't know if the newer books by Niels Pfläging are available in English, but they are superior to those mentioned. Be warned, though, Pfläging is a bit of an obstructionist.

Another interesting fellow is Daniel Mezick, whose writing is definitly available in English.

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