Mutterances on miscellaneous matters
Holacracy is in the news, thanks in part to an Atlantic article this month and a FastCompany piece last May.
It’s a new and radical organizational model that Zappos—the online shoe and clothing store—has gone all in on by eliminating management titles. According to holacracy.org this approach “removes power from a management hierarchy and distributes it across clear roles, which can then be executed autonomously, without a micromanaging boss.”
At first is seems to resemble the way many small businesses—including rock bands—operate. But on further analysis, it’s a highly structured and sophisticated system (which would take me multiple blog posts to explicate). To get a handle on this model, I recommend holacracy.org as a place to start.
It will be interesting to see if such an approach can blossom at Zappos, which is owned by Amazon, a company not known for workplace autonomy. Meanwhile, if you want a good guffaw, check this out to see what a real org chart would reveal!
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A half century ago this week, the Beatles’ “Yesterday” was the #1 song on the US pop charts. That the most exciting band in the rock world at the time would release a single featuring one member (Paul McCartney) singing a sad ballad by himself, accompanied only by a mournful string quartet, speaks to the innovative daring that characterized the band’s success. A year and a half later they would change the playing field with the release of their Sgt Pepper album. This is an organizational team that reinvented an entire field of business. (That would be pop music.)