Seriously - in the absence of formal power structures, informal ones will always form, and they are often less accountable and fair than formal ones.
Even at my current corporate job, it's the same situation, but by now I've learned that you just need to take power. The one source of legitimate power you do have as an employee, especially in our industry, is the power to leave.
These days I cultivate a kind "I don't give a shit" attitude that works pretty well.
It looks like officially he isn't the boss, but for almost all practical purpose he is.
The worst thing that happens in such places is, those people using their power to help their buddies, gangs and yes men for their own benefit and political power. If you are not one of them you are screwed.
What's happening here is that in flat organizations it's the -only- power structure and thus becomes more pronounced to our brains which are hard-wired to pattern match for the social power structures.
Another way of looking at this is to see the hierarchical power structure as an abstraction that evolved to address the discomfort (some) people have with a more fluid power structure like at Valve.
The interesting part here is that different people have different tolerance for this though; so much so that it's one of Hofstede's main cultural dimensions called 'Power distance'. [2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstede%27s_cultural_dimension...
In informal hierarchies relationships become personal and political. In anarchy, everything is politics and personal.
> Informal power structures in hierarchal groups have less power and they happen only between peers.
I think, unless you work in a very strict command-and-control style company, you're heavily underestimating the influence of the average informal power structure.
In structured organizations there may be rules and processes to handle promotion and management, but I've seen them being gamed by people in power more than I've seen them being used for improving anything.
I've seen a lot of bad decisions being made, but speaking out about them is often not appreciated, so by now I've given up on trying to fix those problems and I just occasionally lament them in the coffee room.
(Note: I work for a formerly large multinational, whose structure and processes have mostly been rusted in place. I, and many of my colleagues, are leaving the company for the lack of a clear direction, which is a result of poor management over more than a decade.)
It made career advancement a game of getting the organization to fund your educational "goals" so you could get a better position.
Turns out though that this left large gaps in the organizational structure where there simply wasn't anybody internal who was qualified to move into a position so they turned to outside hires. As it turns out, outside hires were simply exempt from many of these promotion requirements. So career advancement ended up with people quitting, going someplace else for a few months, then getting hired back into the position they wanted to be promoted to in the first place.
It was an absurd place to work.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2001/jun/29/comment
e.g. The UK Civil Service is probably very proud of being a meritocracy - where the "best" people are promoted. However, none of their definitions of "merit" actually relate to ability to perform current or promoted roles!
Generally, any organization that has an arbitrary structure that is used to assign roles to individuals in a way that statistically aligns with a usual hierarchy, using some quantifiable metric that makes one group smaller than another.
There's this self-destructive modality that organizations can enter into where politics matter more than product and people worry about their own resume and ego more than functioning as a team to do something greater than the sum of the parts.
If you take any pride in your craft, that's the ultimate red flag to run like hell.
Believe me, if you could compare similar sized organization with same people working with and without hierarchies, you would pick one with hierarchy 8 times of 10.
Nepotism and cliques are bad, but worse is when the behind the scenes/informal leaders are able to make someone else look like the leader, and that person ends up being the strawman for whatever doesn't go as planned.
In places like government you get all sorts of oddball organizational dysfunction, as you generally have a top layer of politically appointed leaders and lower stratums of career/professional leaders who usually cannot be removed and may or may not play ball with the leadership.
Succeeding in this kind of organization requires not only jockeying for position, but more subtly, overcoming the self-imposed coercion. This is where irreverence comes in handy. Once you eradicate fear, you can afford to take the risks required to freely design your relationship with your colleagues such that you have sufficient power. Ultimately you want them to trust you and you want to be able to challenge them on any topic. You want respect, and people respect excellence, confidence, and risk-taking.
If for whatever reason you're working with people who are incapable of collaborating, your irreverence will either be taken as a threat that may change their behavior in your favor, or otherwise you can leave and it won't seem out of the blue.
There was a time when I tried to conform or figure out what other people wanted, but these days I approach people with a clear idea of what I think should be done and say something like: "this is what I'm interested in", with the subtext that I'll just leave if I don't get to do that.
It's a kind of "take it or leave it" attitude.
Personally, having seen Jeri's AR project video, I wouldn't have joined it. It seemed like a rather weak and non-transferable technology that didn't solve fundamental problems with AR and that had limited gameplay possibilities.
If you look at some of the other famous horizontal management companies like SEMCO, they have a periodic bidding/approval cycle. People make a proposal, ask for a budget, and once granted it have temporary autonomy. The counter-pressure is that however they spend their budget is tracked and transparent to everyone. Hence if you fuck around and blow your whole budget on perks for yourself, your proposal won't be continued next time it comes up for bid. From what I remember SEMCO found 6 months a good period.
This is obviously speculation from limited information, but taking Jeri's comments at face value (which I think is entirely reasonable based on how she's conducted herself publicly in the past) valve seems to be missing that key element of temporary autonomy.
An environment where the socially powerful can raid or eject you at any moment they wish is just going to amplify internal political dysfunction.
Of course if there was a boss, there would be a pitch, a cold, hard look at the budget and then a decision, which you may or may not like, but you would have to live with it. At Valve there's no one person to blame that you didn't get what you wanted.
But the result is the same: The company didn't go forward with an interesting but not-obviously profitable project.
Completely maddening if you ask me.
[0] https://github.com/liqd/adhocracy/ note the meaning of the name http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adhocracy
This system would work a lot better if there was a pool of monk-like disciples that are trained to be party functionaries without own opinions. Since that probably won't happen, we should IMO accept that personalities play a role in politics.
We call it "liquid organizations": http://thinkship.cc/en/introduction-to-liquid-organizations/
Check it out. We should team up ;) More info at http://lyd.dario.im/
One way to mitigate this would be to dampen the Karma. For example by using a logarithmic scale. effective-karma = log(karma+1)
― Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda
Instead of being a metaphor repetition device try saying what you think straightforwardly. It goes more interesting places.
"Nudge" refers to a concept in mainstream political science that minor behavioural-economics inspired changes can have a more powerful affect than draconian laws.
The Bernays quote is a sort of tin-foil hat extension of that idea, that someone somewhere is so all powerful they can influence the masses to do what they the person wants.
Total crap.
if the slope of economic self interest is downhill, all the nudging and the clever manipulation of people's perception will not get the rock of humanity to move up the hill.
Idiots like Bernays who think the crowd cannot be left to itself because it might hurt itself with scissors, think that small PR related nudges can guide great decisions. Which is probably true if all you are doing is selling washing powder, or have selective confirmation bias.
As for rocks going up hill, old old books, bloke called Sisyphus.
Down at the bottom or at the crest, it's still a rock.
I remember reading that paper in college. It was the first thing I thought of when I read this. While rooted in the experience of liberal and women's groups, it really has lessons for anybody working in any organization that tries to eschew formality, including startups.
http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
"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 ... Thus structurelessness ... 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."
I think he is quoting someone else, but I dunno who (also the quote might be inacurate, since I translated it from portuguese).
He usually uses this quote when discussing the politics of feminist, to point out that power equality will never be reached, someone always lead, those who step down, will only open positions for others to step up.
It relates to some early (BC) physical theories which proposed that voids are impossible. Also called plenism.
Edit: Good overview at
People need to know what's been decided and what to do, and what others are doing. Whether it's via influence, or via force, people need power.
For instance the open source groups and projects that form at a macro level are more innovative than just one companies structure and would be impossible with that type of organization. The focus of making useful and fun projects goes back to small groups and individuals really though.
There was no formal structure for making new programming languages but individuals (mostly) stepped up to do it to share them because they were free to and the community rewarded that, it also led to many to financial rewards. I think structurelessness is a little messy but individuals and groups (usually small) can shine with the right rewards and outlets. Best organization is small structures within bigger macro ones.