Posted on 06/17/2013 2:38:06 PM PDT by nickcarraway
A nonhierarchical workplace may just be a more creative and happier one. But how would you feel if the whole office voted on whether to hire youand when to give you a raise?
The headquarters of Menlo Innovations occupy the basement level of an office complex in downtown Ann Arbor, not far from the main campus of the University of Michigan. The space is airy and bright and capacious, as befits a successful software company, but unlike the standard-issue corporate hive, there are no cubicles at Menlo, and very few walls, and only a couple of doors, one of which leads to a closet full of sensitive legal documents and another that opens into a conference rooma concession to clients unaccustomed to (or unwilling to fully participate in the spirit of) what is known around here as the Menlo Way.
At ten in the morning on a recent Wednesday, the 50-odd employees of Menlo, most of whom are young and appealingly tousled and predisposed toward navy or forest-green hoodies, rose from their desks and formed a large circle in the middle of the room. Menlo developers practice something called pair programminga technique whereby two coders work simultaneously on a single machine, with one actually manning the keyboard and the other backseat driving from an adjacent chair. The groupings typically remain intact for a few days or a week, at which point they are scuttled and reassigned, the hope being that the constant mutation in team structure will help encourage creativity and prevent frustration.
Since there are no bosses at Menlo (at least not in the traditional sense) and no middle managers (ditto), all that reassigning and fluctuation falls to the team as a whole, a process that requires a lot of air-traffic control. Every morning, the entire staff circles up to discuss strategy.
On the day I attended, the meeting moved with martial efficiency. Two by two, the pairs stepped forward and, with each employee gripping one of the horns of a fat-lady-sings-style helmet, the unofficial symbol of Menlo Innovations, they laid out their plan for the eight hours ahead. The bulk of the speakers were developers and designers (or high-tech anthropologists, a term Menlo has registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office), but there were also quality-assurance and support staffers on hand, and the conversation ran from the jocular to the mundane to the technical:
Were going to be calling this project Gobstopper, because Jawbreaker just sounded a little too hard-core.
Right now, Im doing some organizing of the storage closet.
Every day, Im reminded of how much human suffering in the world is related to technology. Im talking about the new Gmail design.
Im Andrea, and Im working on client invoices.
There was some clapping and some backslapping, of the kind you might observe at a particularly boisterous rec-league indoor soccer game, then all the employees were filing back to their desks, past a poster of Frank Zappa and a bust of Thomas Edison, the patron saint of Menlo and the guy whose famed laboratory, in Menlo Park, New Jersey, inspired this Michigan companys name. Later, one of the quality advocates at Menlo, Joe Rock (real name), explained that the a.m. meeting helps keep morale on the team high and, more important, encourages a feeling of camaraderiea sense that every one of the staffers is working together toward a common goal. Hence the circle, which, in a nod to King Arthurs court, ensures that no one gets a seat at the head of the table.
As I soon discovered, basically everything at Menlo Innovations is so open and transparent and flat that the average office worker, upon entering the Menlo den, might be forgiven for feeling a little suspicious, intrigued, cynical, and jealous all at once.
Consider, for instance, the fact that hiring at Menlo is handled by committee, with each applicant spending a little bit of time with a group of employees, until a consensus can be reached. That same collective decision-making happens during promotions, layoffs, and flat-out firings.
Consider next the charts in the corner of the office, which display the names and titles of the Menlo employees and also their corresponding pay grades. When I first saw them, I was standing in the midst of a scrum of Menlonians, and I suggestedthus belying my own, frankly square work experiencethat it might be a little unnerving to have your salary exposed to your colleagues. And the guy standing to my right actually scoffed. No, he said. Its the opposite. Its liberating.
Its a relatively safe assumption that most of us have, at one point in our lives, worked for a boss. There is comfort in the arrangement: Someone tells us what to do, and we do it. If we do it welland it here could be anything from writing software to assembling a carwe may get a more spacious cube or more money, and if we do it poorly, we can expect to be let go. Above us, in an ever-narrowing spire, are the shift supervisors and floor managers and vice-presidents, each of whom is subject to his or her own unique hierarchical pressures, and above them is the CEO or president or otherwise-titled grand Pooh-Bah who dictates the rules that the rest of us must follow.
Pay grades are posted for everyone to see. (Photo: Illustration by Marc Boutavant) According to Nikil Saval, the author of Cubed, a forthcoming history of the modern office, the top-down management structure first proliferated in the U.S. in the rail era, as corporate barons struggled to maintain control of their sprawling new concerns. The easiest way to govern hundreds of thousands of miles of railroad, they discovered, was to erect a chain of command, which extended from the central office in New York or Chicago to the field offices on the frontier.
It was a strategy that also proved remarkably effective for the heads of large banks and telephone companies and eventuallyIm skipping a few decades herePC manufacturers and soda-pop-makers and multinational data-processing firms. There may even be some evidence that the tiered framework is hardwired into our brains. Hierarchy is prominent across all species and all cultures in the world, Adam Galinsky, a professor at Columbia Business School, told me recently. It reduces conflict, helps with role differentiation, and vastly increases coordination. In other words, employees may need managers because managers define, either implicitly or explicitly, who people are as workers.
In a research paper published last year titled The Path to Glory Is Paved With Hierarchy, Galinsky and several colleagues measured the productivity of mixed power work teams and found that tiered groups outperformed flat ones. The pecking order, they concluded, is the universal default for human social organizationa default that requires minimal social interactions to emerge. The paper cites work by poultry scientists, who have discovered that putting too many high egg producers in the same small space actually decreases overall egg production: It turns out the best egg producers are also the most competitive birds, and in a group setting, they quickly begin fighting over food, space, and territory; these intragroup conflicts then drive egg production down and bird mortality up. Chicken farmers take note: If you want to maximize group-level productivity, you need harmony, and it seems that hierarchy provides the key.
The theory that too many bosses may be an obstacle and not a boon did not achieve widespread prominence until the early eighties. The reasons are multifarious, but business historians believe it had something to do with the economic recession, which gutted the ranks of the middle managers and in the process helped companies realize that all those bosses had actually been slowing things down. There was also an increasing sense that creativityan invaluable commodity at the tech firms and software companies of the new knowledge economymight be muffled by hierarchy. A tiered framework had worked fine for railway bosses, but it could have a frankly inhibiting effect on a team whose sole task was to build something new, often out of thin air. For that, you needed space, you needed support, and above all, you needed freedom.
Studies, in fact, show that although some structure is conducive to creativity, the time to experiment and potentially failto quote Pierre Azoulay, an associate professor at the MIT Sloan School of Managementis vital to the consistent production of innovative ideas.
Among the earliest agitators for a decentralized workplace was Ricardo Semler, the chairman of Brazilian industrial-parts manufacturer Semco. Semler took over Semco from his father, in the early eighties, when he was 23; his first move was to eliminate the majority of the executives and managers. He opened up the company books, organized employees into self-sufficient work teams, and instituted profit-sharing. Semler believed that Semco would perform better as a company if the workers didnt have a platoon of bean countersone of his favorite insultsconstantly looking over their shoulders.
Bureaucracies are built by and for people who busy themselves proving they are necessary, especially when they suspect they arent, he wrote in his 1988 book Turning the Tables (published in the United States under the title Maverick). All these bosses have to keep themselves occupied, and so they constantly complicate everything. Rules are good for prisons and armies, Semler wrote, but for a business that wants people to think, innovate, and act as human beings whenever possible, they serve only four purposes:
1. Divert attention from the companys objectives.
2. Provide a false sense of security for the executives.
3. Create work for bean counters.
4. Teach men to stone dinosaurs and start fire with sticks.
Maverick was an international best seller, and it remains a foundational text for advocates of the flattened workplace today. Tom Preston-Werner, a co-founder of the tech firm GitHub, which allows all employees to set their own schedules and choose their own projects, told me that the book changed my understanding of how a business could be run.
In 1980, less than 20 percent of the companies on the Fortune 1000 list boasted at least some sort of team management structure. By 1990, it was 50 percent. By 2000, it was 80 percent. Companies were trying to figure out the best way to foster creativity, to effect rapid change, to deal with growing global competitiveness, says Stephen Courtright, an assistant professor at Texas A&M, who specializes in the study of self-governing workplaces. In many cases, that involved flat, horizontal management.
Work is just as transparent, with lots of team projectsand scant privacy. (Photo: Illustration by Marc Boutavant) But only in recent years have we really seen the ideal of the democratized workplace brought to its logical conclusion: companies that dont just have fewer managers and bosses but have hardly any bosses at all.
Last month, Fox debuted a reality show called Does Someone Have to Go? In each episode, a squadron of Fox producers descends on an office, puts the employees in charge of day-to-day operations, and turns on the cameras. You will all be the boss, one of the teams is told in an early promo. Cut to a close-up of the furious, disbelieving mug of an employee who looks like hes just been asked to guillotine his golden retriever.
Much of the show works like this: It turns the concept of self-management into the stuff of nightmare. As the New York Times noted, the program assumes that whats wrong with the American workplace is the workers. The problems discussed arent about the structure of the company, or the state of its chosen industry and market, or the economy as a whole. Employees are the enemy. And bosses, by default, the heroes.
All of which would deeply surprise Simon Anderson, the CEO of the web-hosting company DreamHost. Management is a term to me that feels very twentieth century, he says. That 100-year chunk of time when the world was very industrialized, and a company would make something that could be stamped out 10 million times and figured out a way to ship it easily, you needed the hierarchy for that. I think this century is more about building intelligent teams.
Anderson was one of three finalists for the CEO job at DreamHost in 2011. In choosing their new chief executive, the founders of the company decided to open the floor to an online vote. To make his case, Anderson was trotted in front of a majority of its 100 employees, asked to give a little speech, and answered questions from the crowd. He won narrowly, by a margin of 53 to 47 percent. Anderson told me that he has since spoken to some of the employees who voted against him. There were no hard feelings, he said.
DreamHost has a management structure, but workers have the freedom to select their own projects, and the offices, in downtown Los Angeles, are open 24 hours a day.
And there is an increasing number of companies around the country that function similarly. Development at Valve Corporation, a video-game company based near Seattle, is conducted by a network of self-governing teams. Employees choose which team they join and also choose when theyd like to join a new one. Jason Holtman, who until recently worked in business development at Valve, has, in the past, called the setup an organic gravity wellthe number of people on a project helps determine which games are shipped and which are held for more work.
At W. L. Gore & Associates, the makers of Gore-Tex, there are few titles (almost everyone is referred to as an associate), and once a year employees gather to rank their colleagues based on their contributions to the overall success of the company. Those rankings are used by a separate committee of associates to determine pay raises or cuts.
And at IDEOa sprawling design firm with offices in New York, Mumbai, and London, among other citieswork teams are multidisciplinary and mostly self-governing. Every team opens a project by setting a series of personal and collective goals, reviews its progress midway, and closes the project with a self-analysis session.
This structurelargely flat and very flexibleis especially appealing to those new to the workforce, twentysomethings who tend to approach work differently from their parents. The way workers are motivated is changing, says Anderson of DreamHost. Twenty years ago, it was about higher pay. Now its more about finding your work meaningful and interesting. As more and more millennials enter positions of power in the business world, Anderson believes we will soon reach a point where hierarchy itself is passé.
Then there are the employees of Morning Star, a California tomato processor that offers an interesting demographical contrast (its employees are not young creatives). Morning Star annually processes thousands of tons of ripe tomatoes, which are ground down for use in ketchup, pizza sauce, or tomato paste. A little over 2,000 people work for Morning Star at the height of the tomato season. In order to be hired, you first sign something known as a clou, or a Colleague Letter of Understanding. The clou outlines your priorities for the year ahead. If you are a tomato sorter, you pledge to sort a predetermined amount of tomatoes a day for the duration of your stay at Morning Star, and if you are the man who is responsible for helping evaporate the water out of the squishy tomato pulp, then you sign an agreement to evaporate a specific number of gallons of water every week.
Co-workers consult on who gets to stay (Photo: Illustration by Marc Boutavant) Around the facilities, everywhere you turn, are whiteboards and chalkboards and big-screen TVs displaying names and cascading numbersthe tally of what is being done and what remains to be done by each worker. (Morning Star frames it as emancipativeyour impetus to work is no longer tied to the whims of your boss but to your own motivationand most employees seem to agree. But to an outsider, the whole thing seems a little oppressive. What if you have an off day?)
Morning Star was founded by Chris Rufer, a graduate of the UCLA business school. In interviews, Rufer, like Semler, has described the structure of his company as deeply humane, something that buoys the spirits of the workers. The relationships between members of a self-managed team, he has said, are more organic and thus more substantive than the traditional relationship between boss and subordinate, which he describes as both forced and artificial.
To that end, yearly evaluations at Morning Star are handled not by a manager (there are none), but by a group of colleagues who administers a written evaluation of your progress. Paul Green Jr., a member of Morning Stars Self-Management Institute, a kind of internal R&D arm of the company, says the goal is to meet a series of self-defined (capital S) Steppingstones: X amount of gallons, Y number of tomatoes, and so forth.
Conflicts, meanwhile, are handled via a four-step procedure called Direct Communication and Gaining Agreement. The first step is to attempt to appeal directly to the colleague, Green told me. See if you can sort out your differences. Second step is to bring in a third colleague to mediate the argument. The third is to create a panel of six to ten additional colleagues. If all that fails, Rufer can be called upon to join the panel and help render a decision, which occurs about ten times a year.
It may be worth noting that the egalitarian spirit at Morning Star only goes so far: The company is privately held, and no employee, no matter how hard-performing, is entitled to a share of the profits.
One of the first things that Rich Sheridan, the co-founder and CEO of Menlo Innovations, told me, upon my arrival, was Menlos origin story. He tells this story a lot, at conferences and panels, and the whole spiel is practiced, and fluid, and very TED Talkesque. It starts in the late fall of 1997, when Sheridan, at the time a V.P. at a document-translation firm called Interface Systems, invited his then-8-year-old daughter, Sarah, to join him for a day at work. Around five in the afternoon, Sheridan turned to her and asked what she had learned.
Well, Daddy, she repliedand here, Sheridan screws up his face and crunches his body low into his chair and, for a 55-year-old man, does an admirable impression of an 8-year-old girlI learned that youre really important.
What makes you say that? Sheridan asked.
All day long, she said, people came in here and asked you to make a decision for them. And you made a decision, and they went on their way.
Sheridan was mortified. I realized that the organization couldnt move any faster than me, he said. That I was the bottleneck.
He shared his epiphany with a young consultant, James Goebel, who harbored some admittedly radical ideas about modern management. Sheridan had originally brought Goebel onboard to help teach his team some new programming techniques, but they decided instead that Goebel should help him with a redesign of Interface.
Over the next six months, cubicles were dismantled, managers were moved out of their offices and into the middle of the floor, and pair programming was introduced. No longer could any code belong to any one personeveryone would share everything. I had one guy raise his hand, Sheridan remembers, and say, Richblood, mayhem, murder. For Gods sake, dont put us in an open room, dont make me share my computer with another human being, and please, please dont make me share my code.
Sheridan believed that by going from a siloed environment to a collectivized one, Interface would be more productive. And happier. And by all accounts it was, until 2001, when the dot-com bubble burst, and Sheridan and his entire team were shown the door. That same year, Sheridan and Goebel and two partners founded Menlo Innovations. There were the usual start-up obstacles (wary clients, financing challenges, anemic bank accounts), but over the past decade, Menlo vastly increased its revenue, outgrowing one office space after another.
When I first contacted Sheridan, by e-mail, he wrote that it was quite bossless at Menlo! Team makes hiring decisions, team gives feedback, team decides promotions. This is only partially true. Overseeing strategy, the long-term vision of Menlo as a whole, still falls to Goebel (now the chief architect and COO) and Sheridan. If one worker accused another of something illegalsexual harassment or theftGoebel and Sheridan would be responsible for taking the appropriate measures. They also serve as representatives for Menlo at scads of management and business conferences here and abroad. (Sheridans business card reads Chief Storyteller and Tour Guide.)
And who must go. (Photo: Illustration by Marc Boutavant) In every other way, however, Goebel and Sheridan are not traditional bosses. Overarching strategy is their domain, but the tactical stuffthe daily squall of code-making and high-tech anthropologizing that drives the companybelongs entirely to the employees. On the days I spent at Menlo, I never once saw any worker pay Sheridan or Goebel any special deference. No one talked any differently in their presence. They were there as team shrinks and advisers, and yet they were also not therethe rest of the office thrummed on around them, regardless of what either of them did. Sheridans troubling bottleneck had been removed; in its place was a largely self-sufficient software-coding machine.
I asked Sheridan if he ever missed his old office and the clout that came with it. I liked being the person everyone came to, he admitted. There was glory to it. I felt like the smartest guy in the room. But that doesnt matter to me anymore. Its not my goal.
Menlos hiring process is called Extreme Interviewing, and it bears a striking resemblance to speed-dating. Applicants, sometimes as many as five for each open position, are brought into the offices for a series of rapid-fire interviews with a range of current employees. The emphasis is on kindergarten skills: geniality, curiosity, generosity. As the Menlo white paper on Extreme Interviewing puts it, technical proficiency is less important than a candidates ability to make [his or her] partner look good. (Sample interview question: What is the most challenging bug that you helped someone else fix?)
Later the Menlonians gather to compare notes. Lobbying is common; so is argument. Eventually, the candidates are ranked partially on their technical skill and partially on what the white paper describes as the teams value set. Offers are extended to the applicants at the top of the list.
The collective aspect allows one of us to say, Okay, he did really well at this, one employee, Greg Haskins, told me. And another of us to say, But not so well at that. And we bounce opinions back and forth before deciding. Basically, we build our team together.
In an old-fashioned, top-down work environment, employees get rewards from three main sources. One is pay (the better we do, the more we get). The second is title (the better we do, the higher we ascend). The third is a sense of achievement (recognition for having performed a task admirably). In a bossless environment, the calculus is significantly changed. Achievement is tied to the team as a wholeyou can write a particularly nice piece of code, but it wont mean squat until the whole project is up and running, and for that, youll need the assistance of your peers. Individual achievement is obviated and replaced by shared achievement. Friendliness and congeniality start to matter more, ladder-climbing a whole lot less.
And herein an important point: Horizontally managed companies work in large part because they tend to attract people who are okay working in a bossless environment and weed out the ones who arent. (I can smell a corporate-ladder climber from a mile away, one Menlonian explained.)
Which is not to say that everything at Menlo is peace and love and synergistic intellectual communion. Its not. It couldnt beno matter how lofty the theories espoused in the glossy, professionally bound 73-page Menlo guidebook (available for free to visitors), its adherents are human, who by their very nature gossip, back-talk, and bicker. Are there fewer problems here than elsewhere? Goebel asked me rhetorically. Im inclined to say no. We just deal with our problems differently. And the problems themselves are different.
Most of those problems originate in the vacuum left by the traditional management structure. Stephen Courtright told me the story of a manufacturing company that had misunderstood, in his words, what self-management was all aboutfew boundaries or guidelines were set for the work teams, and the feedback loop was practically nonexistent. (Courtright, who was consulting for this company, declined to disclose its name.) They were just kind of set loose to do their thing, Courtright said, and they produced too much inventory, and the company ended up with a stockpile of unused stuff. An executive decision was made to go back to a top-down hierarchy.
At Menlo, employees must necessarily be self-starters and willing to work collaboratively; if they arent, the rest of the team will show them the door. Several Menlonians recalled for me the story of a man Ill call John. At first John seemed like an ideal employeediligent and hardworking. But the horizontal structure at Menlo clearly ate at him, and under-the-breath grumbling soon gave way to very loud bellyaching.
One afternoon at lunch, he stood up and told his colleagues that they were insanethat they needed to be freed from this weird Nazi regime, in the recollection of someone who witnessed the explosion. Sometime after, the team fired him.
Firing, developer Kealy Opelt told me, is something the company takes very seriously. Usually, I wouldnt think about bringing in the group unless Ive had to talk to someone several times. If it keeps happening, and you both cant adjust, thats when you start talking to everybody else and see if its just the two of you.
Over subsequent weeks, a series of meetings will be held, and as with the Extreme Interviewing process, a consensus will be reached. If it is determined by the team that a person has to go, theres very little that Sheridan or Goebel can do about it.
To illustrate, Goebel told me about his niece, Erin, who spent a couple of months at Menlo as an admin, before the other employees decided to let her go. Goebel objected, but at Menlo, nepotism has no place. Actually, my niece lives with me, he said. And she was really pissed. Thankfully, she didnt take it out on the relationship with my wife or my kids. Still, it was a little frosty for a while.
This kind of team decision-making can be seen as the ultimate motivational toolalways work hard, and your co-workers wont can you. It can also be the kind of thing that yields a whole lot of ad hoc office alliances.
Opelt and colleague John Martin, for instance, told me that they had both recently recommended each other for promotions. They swore it was coincidentalthey both believed the other deserved itbut its not hard to imagine the existence of a lot more deliberately constructed pacts.
And then there is that chart thats plastered prominently on the wallthe one that displays the titles of Menlo employees and their respective pay grades. This is a new innovation, introduced by Goebel over lunch a few months earlier to address curiosity from staffers about where they stood in the overall scheme of the open office. Although almost all of the employees had written their names in Magic Marker on the poster, there were a few abstainers. I think people are still deciding how to handle that, one employee told me. Its stirred up a little bit of controversy. Like, that it might actually be a step too far.
Goebel and Sheridan confessed that the idea was still in its infancyan experiment, Goebel said. Paul Green used much the same language to describe an analogous open-book policy at Morning Star. Full transparency in terms of compensation is something were working on, he said. Its a process.
One afternoon, I was invited to attend the weekly kickoff meeting for the fifteen team members assigned to the account of a local biotech firm that manufactures flow cytometersmachines that test blood and sundry other fluids. Menlo is developing the software that organizes and analyzes data collected by the device.
The purpose of the kickoff meeting was to discuss the code that needed to be completed by the end of the week, and the fifteen Menlonians arranged themselves in a loose circle around a set of tables. Notepads and pens were produced. Goebel and Sheridan were absentneither man typically attends these meetings because, as Jack Coy, a developer on the account, told me, to be honest, we dont need them.
Initially the proceedings moved smoothly. A pair of programmers would walk up to one of those big easel pads and discuss the code theyd been assigned and sometimes sketch on the paper a couple of key components. The floor was then opened to the rest of the team, who might shout out questions or suggestions.
At one point, I watched Jeff Jia and Jack Coy, two programmers in their twenties, describe an issue with an important piece of code. Caveat: Software design is an extremely complex science, and people who work in software tend to talk in jargony, acronym-heavy shorthand. For that reason, I will not attempt to recount the exact parameters of the problem Jia and Coy were facing, but suffice it to say it involved a digital filter that had been built to catch certain subsets of cytometer data and arrange those subsets into colored charts.
But the filter wasnt functioning properly, and Jia and Coy were stumped. They had the look of stumped peoplelips puckered, arms crossed, shoulders raised. After a little while, they were joined at the easel by Greg Haskins. Haskins is 27, with a babyish face and unruly brown hair, and although he has only been at Menlo for little over a year, he clearly maintains an outsize presence among his peers; when he talks, the other coders tend to listen.
Now Haskins gestured a few more team members to their feet and began arranging them in front of the easel pad like mannequins. What followed was a piece of anarchic and improvised street theater: Rock, the ponytailed quality-advocate dude, was assigned the role of filter, and Kristi Sitarski and Joe Ptolemy were the data that the filter was meant to be sorting. Sitarski stepped forward (she was in), and Ptolemy stepped back (he was out). Everyone laughed. This was team spirit in action. This was collective action.
Except it wasnt, not really. Instead it was an action that had been driven in large part by an individualHaskins. I was reminded of the control group of chickens referenced in Galinsky & Co.s The Path to Glory Is Paved With Hierarchy. Some of them were prolific egg producers and some of them were low-level layers, but together, in a mixed-power group, they formed a nice symphony of egg production. Perhaps Galinsky was right that as animals, we do naturally slot ourselves into some sort of hierarchy. Certainly I was seeing something similar now: However ostensibly egalitarian this Menlo work team was, in practice, a leader had quickly emerged, and everyone else was falling in line.
A few weeks after my visit to Ann Arbor, during a conversation with Tom Preston-Werner of GitHubitself a mostly horizontal companyI happened to use the word flat. He stopped me. With people, there are always senses of authority and matters of seniority and so many other social factors at play, he said. Youre fooling yourself if you think a group bigger than a single person can ever really be flat. But the people at companies like Menlo or GitHub or Morning Star dont seem to care. Instead, its possible that the triumph of the flattened office may be the creation of work environments in which leaders organically arise, and all employees feel a sense of ownership, whether real or imagined.
Jason Holtman, formerly of Valve, has said that the big negative of going bossless is the loss of the quick mandatethe ability to swiftly and effectively mobilize the organization. A management structure may be democratic, and thus empowering to the workers, but that does not mean it is neat, nor particularly fast.
That kickoff meeting for that biotech firm was longit started at 11 a.m. and went until almost two in the afternoon, with a break in betweenand by the midway mark, the proceedings were moving a little more slowly, with more exasperated sighs, or slight but conspicuous head shakes, and sometimes everyone seemed to be talking simultaneously, in one big, warbly squawk.
Kealy Opelt, leaning forward, attempted to wrestle the proceedings back on track.
So where were we? shed say. Or: I didnt hear that, Jeff. Could you repeat it for everyone? Or: One at a time, please.
Later, I asked her if shed been frustrated.
Look, she said, we dont want people having their arms all crossed and not saying anything, with this brooding idea they havent shared with anybody. That would be worse. But yeah, it can get chaotic.
Chaotic, noisy, somewhat lumberingMenlo may be all those things, but it is also a profitable company. Revenue in 2012 was about $4 million, and employee retention rates are notably high. As the organization has grown its client list, it has expanded the number of programmers it keeps on staff, and when the company posts an advertisement for an open gig, a flood of applications typically pours in. Around Ann Arbor, Menlo Innovations is considered an extremely desirable place to work.
Not that its an easy place to work. More than one employee told me that it took them some time to get used to the peculiar demands of the officethe lack of doors, the lack of privacy, the constant and sometimes exhausting presence of the rest of the staff.
To help relieve some of that pressure, walkies were introduced several years ago. A walkie is exactly what it sounds likea ten-minute group walk around the block. The daily ritual is intended to allow the basement-bound Menlonians a chance to unwind and to see the sun. On one walkie, I found myself between two Menlo employees, Natalie Svaan and Jack Coy. They could not be more unalike. Svaan, a Michigan native with silver-streaked black hair, came to Menlo after a career in IT. Coy is still in college; he works at Menlo part time.
I remember when I first got hired, I was so wiped out, Svaan was saying. Id just come home and collapse. But you know, its strange; its gotten to be energizing. The hours do actually fly right by, probably because youre always working.
And theres the team thing, Coy added. Its part of your task to make the team succeed and to help other people do their jobs. Its not to promote oneself at the expense of the rest of the team. I like that.
He shook his head. I think there are actually people, he added, in a tone of deep and abiding wonder, who want to just go to work, be told what to do, do it, and go home.
bfl
This should be an interesting experiment. Lord of the flies comes to mind.
I worked in a place that tried the team management thing once. It was a disaster.
reminds me of all the hippie communes from the 60’s and 70’s. Sounds good in theory.
Somewhere along the line, they will go “Lord of the Flies”
I have seen it hapeen in other “Bossless” workplaces
Exactly, I have no high hopes for this place. It will go down in flames. Leadership is very important component.
Ask the White House staff.
I read about a tenth of this lengthy article and asked my nine team mates to read the rest, we’ll get together after it is read and let you know what we think of it.
I remember right before the dot.com bust how tech businesses staffed mainly by young people were explaining how the new internet way of doing business didn’t require their companies to make a profit.
The Brave New Post-Obama World includes plans for things like Worker Co-Operatives and Democratized Workplaces.
My thought exactly.
‘New York Ragazine” right
so like with the Clintons, after he got caught outright, we had MSM stories about how Lying is a GOOD thing for these reasons...
Now we begin to see, Absent leadership is the new model.
Obama wasn’t there, didn’t know a thing about what went on.
So much depends on the people. Where I’m at we have untracked sick time and people hardly ever call in sick, in fact we usually have to be ordered out by our hypochondriac boss. Discussing that with my wife she says it would never work where she’s at, there’s a big chunk of people there that see sick time as any old time off and burn it as soon as they get it, untracked you’d never see them again. We’re pretty self managed here, most of the stuff the boss does is keep the rest of corporate off our backs and help us with technical stuff (he knows the code better than anybody). If you have self motivated people that want to do the work the best thing a boss can do is get out of the way.
Keep the environment small enough and it can work with the right people. More typically it’s just another tired effort to run a factory with workers’ soviets. That one didn’t end well.
This article neglects the fact that profit margins force companies to regularly prune the natural growth of management, something government and non-profits don’t.
While there are some long term communal workplaces like a priest-founded co-op in Spain and co-ops in the Northeast and California, most don’t last past the retirement of their founders. The only ones that have lasted decades and centuries are religiously based ones.
Leadership is important when you need to make someone do something, such as an unpleasant task.
Collectivists always think that they’re the first to think of collectivism, and if they don’t they think that the only reason collectivism never works is because they weren’t part of it those other times it failed.
[snort]
Ayn Rand wrote about a factory run like this office. It was the one that John Galt quit.
A buddy of mine was living in Chile in the early '70's was telling me that this is how the entire country ran. It was total chaos; at the beginning of every day work crews would vote on whether they'd do anything that day.
They had a 'consensus' all right, but that was about it.
I think it’s an appealing notion. Just that when it fails, it will do so in a spectacular fashion.
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