Talented People Frequently Don’t Rise to the Top

Re:Talented People Frequently Don’t Rise to the Top by beaner on Thursday March 25, 2021 @02:51PM (#26583914)

Not really a problem on the face of it.

If literally everyone in a company is talented, how can that company have any hierarchy or structure without it being claimed that talented people frequently don't rise to the top within the company? Some talented people must be at the bottom by definition.

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Re:Talented People Frequently Don’t Rise to the Top by inetknght on Thursday March 25, 2021 @02:54PM (#26583947)

Why must a company have any hierarchy? Why "must" there be a bottom and a top?

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Re:Talented People Frequently Don’t Rise to the Top by nnp7000 on Thursday March 25, 2021 @03:16PM (#26584221)

Because explicit hierarchy is almost always better than implicit hierarchy, which is what happens at a "self-organizing" company. A company may start off with good intentions but without some hierarchy past a certain size or tribal connections (e.g. friends and co-founders), then either:

a) Progress slows to a crawl with everyone trying to reach consensus on everything. This also leads to less accountability.

b) Everyone doing their own thing leading to an operational mess and constantly repeated work.

c) An implicit power structure forming and working behind the scenes which then breeds an atmosphere of paranoia and stress.

I'm reminded of these tweets about Valve from Richard Geldreich: https://www.reddit.com/r/valve/comments/8zmp07/former_valve_...

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Re:Talented People Frequently Don’t Rise to the Top by perl4ever on Thursday March 25, 2021 @09:54PM (#26588015)

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberated_company

  https://kevinmeyer.com/blog/2008/01/no-titles-excep.html

  "There is no organization chart
  There are no job titles or job descriptions
  No performance criteria
  No bonuses and no perks
  No regularly scheduled meetings
  No approval levels for capital or expense spending
  No goals
  No offices or high-walled cubicles
  If the peers accept the idea, then "management" is presumed to accept it – hence the need for very little management
  Every employee is simply expected to figure out where they fit

  There is one honorary job title: Plant Manager.  But it’s not what you think.  This facility, what amounts to a very large machine shop filled with heavy 5-axis CNC’s, has hundreds of live plants hanging from the ceiling.  The Plant Manager is the person in charge of maintaining the plants."

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Re:Talented People Frequently Don’t Rise to the Top by jsty on Thursday March 25, 2021 @03:02PM (#26584063)

Well they don't "have to", but completely non-hierarchical / flat organisations have a habit of either (1) descending into anarchy, or (2) developing hidden hierarchies.

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Re:Talented People Frequently Don’t Rise to the Top by PopsiclePete on Thursday March 25, 2021 @02:59PM (#26584011)

So everyone is equally empowered to make decision on the strategic direction of the company?

If I got hired tomorrow at Google, I should just be able to decide to kill off Android and Chrome, yeah?

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