How Medium is building a new kind of company with no managers

Re:How Medium is building a new kind of company with no mana... by bowlofpetunias on Tuesday August 06, 2013 @02:49PM (#6168415)

I hate all of these pretentious claims about new ways of working when they all do exactly the same thing:

1) Set up a straw man in the form of "traditional management", whilst there are hundreds of forms of management and managers, most of which don't "look at reports as resources", or even look at people as "reports". As a manager, I find this insulting.

2) These shiny new methods are the way many small companies have worked for fucking decades. They just weren't so fucking pretentious about it.

It's the same shit as with shiny new technology, frameworks and methods in our business: everyone thinks they've invented the wheel, and nobody bothers to look around them (and especially behind them) to see if the same thing hasn't been done countless times before.

Excuse the language, but this attitude is just pathetic. Nothing new is being invented here.

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Re:How Medium is building a new kind of company with no mana... by sciurus on Tuesday August 06, 2013 @08:05PM (#6170039)

But if you're pretentious about it, you can sell certification and licensing.

http://holacracy.org/

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Re:How Medium is building a new kind of company with no mana... by nomade0 on Wednesday August 07, 2013 @03:28AM (#6171353)

I have to say I agree with your point 1) in general.

But not with 2). Holacracy is not just a set of vague principles that you swear to apply as best as you can, or some bolt-on process to add to your box. It's a completely different way of governing a company, a different power structure, and its rules are specific and spelled out: http://holacracy.org/constitution

Whether it works or not is another question, but at least it's different. Then, sure, it's not a silver bullet: http://youtu.be/gltN3NuY5dc

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