Preface: I work at Figure 53, nearing three years. We're an LLC (so he's owner, not CEO), not a startup, not funded, profitable for five years, and we only have five full time employees.

I think the set of principles we've been operating under have been working pretty well and I believe Chris to be a genuine person, but I'm biased by being personally involved with this particular story. It might also be important to note that while he didn't give the numbers in the story, we all who voted got to see the numbers before and after (he's never hidden them from us) and the effect the new salaries have on our bottom line.

I can see how it could go wrong given employees trending towards unhappy/defensive and a boss trending towards dishonest, but that would be an awful situation to be in no matter what kind of gimmicks the bosses introduce.

So then stop teasing us and tell us what the numbers were already! I mean it doesn't make sense to blog about this idea about transparency and then withhold the most interesting point which is what the actual dollar amounts were.

Why are the dollars the most interesting point? I find the concrete numbers less interesting than the relative result.

At any rate, we're not really obligated to share our numbers on our blog. :-) Might be reasons we'd want to keep those private, no?

I think it'd interesting to know how the absolute salaries are relative to the market for particular roles. No absolute numbers are necessary, but I suspect a lot of folk would be interested to know how it shook out when you would compare apples to apples for a given role in the baltimore market.

Also, since you're the OP and on the thread, I would love a post [or even a reply to this] on how your rental scheme is going [and perhaps some idea as to what portion of the product's revenue is from rental]. Very cool & interesting model we've thought a lot about lately.

You showed a scale, but there was no relative basis. Just sharing percentages would be interesting as it would help us understand what the variance is. Did you want to give everyone a raise of about 10% and they wanted 15%?

BTW - I love the experiment and may use it for my next hires, your transparency is commendable and while it may not work for everyone I love the idea of making new hire salary negotiations into true salary discussions.

You're right, I need to include information to show how close my guess was; I'll try to edit it in the coming week to include that.

If not the absolute numbers, what about the percent difference between your number and the average?

If you would like to see salary numbers, there are a ton of them on the web. Personally, I thought the numbers were the least interesting part of this.

The actual number is irrelevant.

Is it stupid? It's working for his company, and he says it's a good fit for now, and doesn't know if it'll keep working or work for anybody else. Have you ever tried it? Can you point to scholarship where it was tried and failed?

And the 'subtle manipulation and hidden cliques' is how human reality works - a flat organization structure just allows that to be the natural environment, rather than trying to force that natural human nature onto a strange arbitrary structure. You only get one set of politics and handicaps to fight, instead of 2 counterposed sets.

And finally, making decisions by fiat or decree is not leadership. Read literally anything about leadership, stretching back centuries of human thought on the subject, and you're realize how off the mark you are. He LEAD the company to the voting process, he LEAD the company on deciding how to develop/deliver/market (successfully, apparently). He's definitely a leader.

There are various styles of leadership. He's a leader, but his style leans away from the more authoritative (not authoritarian) style so many of us are accustomed to.

Semco in Brazil has been doing this for over 20 years and they are not a small company.

You might be interested to read about open-book management:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-book_management