I don't know if it's a cult. That's why I hedged my whole comment with "maybe I'm imagining this but...".

It's too early to say whether it works. There's a saying I'm trying to remember, something about 'you can only see the rocks at low tide'. Almost anything will look wonderful in good times, and it's easy to attribute that success to whatever you're doing at the time. It's not until bad times that its flaws become visible.

Zappos was built to its current state on a hierarchical structure. They haven't yet had its decentralized structure tested in any significant way. If Zappos hits a slump in sales for whatever reason, how will the organization respond? Will Holacracy survive a crisis like that? That's where you'll really see if it's a useful system to govern a company.

Yep. But hierarchical bureaucracies are also rife with inefficiency and dysfunction. Coordinating the activity of groups of human beings at scale is just a hard problem. It could be that holacracy is effectively not much different than hierarchical bureaucracy, but with different tradeoffs and personalities. Then Zappos has to bear the weight of defending holacracy when it is not demonstrably the case that a traditional management structure would necessarily have done better.

Or it could be that it is significantly worse, and that the inertia of the brand keeps the boat moving (albeit slowing?). A shift to a newer model could be seen as a way to reduce headcount and contain costs.

It's interesting that one of the big role models in tech, Steve Jobs, was a total dictator. Exactly the opposite of holocracy.

> Holacracy a cult? Why not traditional management a cult? The difference being simply that traditional management is broadly accepted as "normal" by society at large.

You can't define 'cult' without an element of normative determination. It's right there in the first sentence on the Wiki page for cult, and in every dictionary definition I could find.

Also, the term does not necessarily carry a derogatory tone. I've seen many small spiritual groups self-describe as cults.

Traditional management structures are shit, but at least you know how they work, and there are lots of well-worn coping methods for dealing with them. The problem with crazy new management styles is that they often hide their true nature underneath a veneer of newness (for example, "flat"), and that true nature can sometimes be completely different from the ostensible version.

True. In practice, power in Zappos and holacracy is probably much more centralized, more arbitrary and less transparent than that of a hierarchical organization because there is no explicit structure. There is nothing protecting the lower rung people from the whims of those in the top.

> Holacracy a cult? Why not traditional management a cult? The difference being simply that traditional management is broadly accepted as "normal" by society at large.

Well, the only difference between a cult and a religion is age. And possibly whether they tell you to see a doctor if you get sick, not sure what the parallel to that would be.