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Comment by jcrites | Hacker News Reader

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....

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

That's the stance taken in a famous feminist essay from 1970, "The Tyranny of Structurelessness": http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7409611

"Interestingly, none of the organizations I have researched for the book Reinventing Organizations are employee-owned; the question of employee ownership doesn’t seem to matter very much when power is truly distributed."

Excuse me while I raise a questioning eyebrow.

I think that's kind of right - it's the explicit awareness of hierarchy or other structures that works. (I'd argue that actually you can have hierarchy-less (sp?) organisations, but they require particular consideration - but you'll still overlay other assemblages - social hierarchies or whatever, on top of it. I did a bit responding to the Tony Hsieh email from our perspective as a company that's trying to implement Holarchy right now: http://blog.granttree.co.uk/post/117079306181/zappos-two-poi...

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

It didn't work. See Rich Geldreich's blog, http://richg42.blogspot.com/. People still try and optimize for looking good vs their coworkers on other teams vs simply doing the best work possible.

Examples, http://richg42.blogspot.com/2015/01/open-office-spaces-and-c..., http://richg42.blogspot.com/2015/01/microsofts-digs.html

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