"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.