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>In the wake of this, I’m starting to think all of the problems we’re seeing with Silicon Valley these days—the ineptitude at politics, the clumsiness with handling inequality in SF, the lack of gender and racial diversity in the industry—are actually rooted in a systemic failure to understand how power works

I'm completely lost here: so the way to solve the problem of people with a lot of power oppressing people with little or no power is to replace the oppressive people with power with better powerful people?

Isn't this quite close to the idea that somewhat progressive dictators are good?

EDIT — Kinda ad hominem-y: "Until November 2012, she ran the Obama campaign's technology office in San Francisco where she recruited technology volunteers to build software for the campaign."

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Managers aren't powerful people. Their job is to see powerful people's will is done, in a way that will minimally piss off the workers. So a good manager is one that can pull the wool over your eyes enough that you do the things those in power want.

Your argument is fallacious. You've cherry picked a single line from her argument and misrepresented it.

Her argument is against holacracy, not against management. What I got out of the article is that when you have a system with no conventional management structure you end up filling the vacuum with people who take advantage of it. In this case some of the people at GitHub who have been accused of harassment would have been dealt with earlier if there was a better management structure in place.

I think your read on this is a little strong. The point is that a power structure is going to emerge in an organization eventually, and a formal, out-in-the open power structure is less likely to be abused than the sort of off-the-record de facto power structure that will inevitably emerge in a "no management" type company.

Just because people have power doesn't mean they are "progressive dictators" or "oppressing people".

I think the point is more that bureaucracy exists, in the best case, to distribute power throughout an organization. Delegation of authority necessarily means a reduction in power at the top.

As an ideal, picture a "separation of powers" system - you no longer have a co-founder managing HR disputes in which they are the defendant, for example.

> Isn't this quite close to the idea that somewhat progressive dictators are good?

No, it's quite close to the idea that progressive power structures are good, as opposed to anarchy followed by "obviously everything will end up being progressive now that I've torn down the structure of power".

But isn't that why the people behind the Holacracy concept have a whole structure (with pretty pictures!) that is supposed to replace the managerial layer?

http://holacracy.org/how-it-works

I have no idea if holacracy is bullshit or not (it does feel like a concept invented to sell training classes), but claiming it replaces managers with nothing is plainly false.

If I'm understanding the linked article correctly, she wasn't claiming holacracy guts management, she was claiming that it introduces a power vacuum. And from what I can tell in that pretty picture you provide, she's probably actually right.

E.g. who sets the "strategic direction" for the company? Who guides the unending governance meetings to decide who the managers will be that day? Who decides which spouses get to work on company property without pay, and which employees are allowed to date other employees?

The way those things get resolved will show you who's really in charge.

> E.g. who sets the "strategic direction" for the company?

The circle whose focus is strategic direction.

> Who guides the unending governance meetings to decide who the managers will be that day?

Unending governance meetings and "decide who the managers will be that day" both seem like signs of a circle with a poor governance process (probably, one that is trying to force things into a non-holarchic structure.)

> > E.g. who sets the "strategic direction" for the company?

> The circle whose focus is strategic direction.

Sweet. Now we know who's actually in charge, it's whoever is a member of that circle. That wasn't so hard.

The idea that having focus on long-range, broad-scope problems is intimately tied to authority is a typical assumption of traditional heirarchies, but there's no reason it has to be true in holacracies.

It has nothing to do with whether you call the direction "strategic", "next quarter" or "tactical". If you have the authority to set the direction at all you're the one (or few) in charge.

We prefer these types of direction to be long-term if only to avoid having a business do its own random walk through the markets, but don't confuse scope with authority.

Also, can you expand on what you are digging at with your "kinda ad hominem-y" line? The technology arm of Obama's campaign was generally viewed in a very positive light, as far as I remember. And not the same thing as the brains behind the Obamacare debacle. So I'm not sure what the dig is. Is it because she is a recruiter rather than an engineer? Still not sure how that would disqualify her opinion in this case.

I read it as someone close to the maximum representative of hierarchy (the President of the whole US) having an incentive to discredit less hierarchical systems.

Exactly.

A second facet of that is that Catherine seems to be arguing[0] that organizations with no hierarchy give the false impression of power for employees and society at large. Doesn't a similar situation happen with democracy: people can vote Obama, Romney or Absolutely Not Viable Other Candidate and get the false impression of being represented[1]. In the same vein, wouldn't democracy be bullshit?

[0]: Both in this reply and the previous one, I'm speculating entirely — the post seems like an intro to a future more detailed explanation of why holacracy does the things this intro mentions it does.

[1]: Many times people will get most of what they want (as happens in a company, holocratic or not). Both my argument and the author's argument concern the exceptions to the rule: the times when people don't get what they want, or are completely run over.

That's not remotely what the author offers as a solution. What she's saying is that "rule of law" is actually kind of a good idea.

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