One of the popular references in this area is the USMC's book Warfighting (free PDF, Google it), which lays out their doctrine of Manoeuvre Warfare, i.e. that by optimising the speed at which your force can react and manoeuvre you can overload your opponent's command structure. To do that they distribute decision making to the greatest feasible extent under the premise that a squad leader on the front lines has the most accurate information, so must be empowered with the right amount of context and self-determination within their orders. Rather than "take that hill" it's more like "we need to advance to X, and the mortar on that hill is preventing us".
Anyway, the main point is that nobody to my knowledge is suggesting we get rid of management (the verb), and nor is anyone saying that we should ignore the power structures inherent in hiring/firing/remuneration.
What are you talking about? In the flat-managed places I've worked in, a group a peers periodically voted on everyone else's performance. If you had to leave the office for something, you announced it (but never asked permission for it ) on the group mailing list.
> Does somebody extract the excess value from the of the labor you provide, and claim the right to do so by more efficiently organizing the workplace so as to produce value most efficiently?
The one I'm talking about was a publicly traded company, so no. The technical "owner" of the company had little to no say in the management. Maybe this place was not the typical employer. It was in a field where talent is extremely valued. The employees ruled.
If you ask me, it's quite a bit harder to brown-nose 20 of your peers, than just one boss. The dynamics were vastly different than a non-flat, 1-boss system.
> publicly traded company, so no.
Er, yes. The shareholders get your excess value and are ultimately in control. Ford v. Dodge is your constraint. I'm sure they take no active part so long as you're successful, but when you're not, what happens then?
The self-organisation described is not pure mutuality, it's just delegation from the shareholders, who currently trust that the organisation's self-organising will most likely give them the best return. Ultimately they have the right to reorganise you.
I think this outlook is either very semantic or are overlooking how much human organisations vary geographically and historically. We have had tribes, clans, nations, hoards, navies, divinely mandated empires, amateur field hockey teams, political parties, a diverse range of associations wherein people wear uncomfortable clothes and vow celibacy... An "organisation" is just a group of people a memoplex of human culture. We have had all sorts.
A limited liability company is just one of these. We are going to keep inventing more of them. I don't think it's far fetched to expect that one or two of them will produce camera drones, video games, or medicines.
If you think these are all the same, because the abbot is the manager or something along these lines, that's what I mean by very semantic. Otherwise, change is always possible.
By the way, for reference, VCs invested $48 billion (~= 44 billion €) in 2014, which was the top year since 2000.
http://europa.eu/workingforyou/en/content/eu-launches-€-315-...
Interesting theory. (Let me add Minneapolis to your list.) The Midwest gets a lot of bad press on the Coasts ("flyover country") but what's missed is that if you control for urban-versus-rural or for density, it's probably the most educated and liberal part of the country (perhaps tied with the Pacific Northwest). The East Coast, for example, isn't notably cultured (to any degree that's hard to find in other parts of the country) outside of certain neighborhoods in Boston or New York (which are getting expensive and inaccessible anyway).
The real cultural tension in the U.S. isn't South vs. North or "Red States" versus "Blue States". You might call it "urban versus rural", but there are so few farmers (and most farmers I know are actually quite educated; you have to be smart to compete with agricorps) that it's more of an urban versus suburb dichotomy (with the distinction depending more on lifestyle and outlook than whether the location is technically part of the incorporated city).
So yes, I agree. I don't know that we need more talent coming into the Midwest (although it won't hurt); we just need to stop losing the talent that we have to the Bay Area (where young engineers are still paid better after adjusting for cost-of-living; once you get older, the Midwest starts to win because it's more like 140k vs. 170k than 70k vs. 120k). Obviously, most of those talented people don't stay in the Bay Area (they get older, need space for families) but there isn't a clear "next" destination for them. Do they go to Seattle? Chicago? Portland? Austin? Somewhere else? Perhaps this is a good thing, though, because it's probably better for the country to have talent spread around than to try to replicate an aberration (SV's concentration of economic activity, which congests it and deprives the rest of the country).
Did somebody hire you? He's your boss. Can somebody fire you? He's your boss. Can they tell you to show up at work at certain times, or prevent you from taking the afternoon off to take your kid to the doctor? He's your boss. Can someone control whether or not you get a raise? They're your boss.
Most importantly:
Does somebody extract the excess value from the of the labor you provide, and claim the right to do so by more efficiently organizing the workplace so as to produce value most efficiently? That's what management is.
These functions don't have to be performed by specific people with CO titles, but they do need to be done. A cooperative can perform them in a slightly different way, a partnership by slightly different rules, a privately-held VC-backed corporation by others, and publicly-traded multinationals by yet others.
I have a hard time believing that Silicon Valley is about to see a wave of startups organized in a cooperative structure. The entire culture and infrastructure is built like a factory farm to raise little companies into behemoths by pumping them full of steroids, hormones, and venture capital. I doubt most worker-run companies would make the same kinds of ethical and business decisions that VCs do, and I really* don't see VCs changing the MO to one where they just sign checks and then let the workers decide what to do with them democratically.
That said, if tech talent remains scarce, and therefore in a position to continue demanding the kind of humane treatment all workers would like, that talent may just be able to drive a change--but it won't happen in California. My guess would be that this may drive engineers to the Midwest, with its lower cost of real estate and already-entrenched culture of cooperatives (in agriculture and some industries) and worker-led structures like labor unions. Places like Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, or maybe even college towns like Madison and Ann Arbor (where housing cooperatives are very prevalent and widely-accepted) would be where I would look for this kind of change first. Current "'Silicon $foo' where $foo != 'Valley'" type cities (St. Louis, Austin, etc) may be a good bet too.
In short, Dylan was right, and ultimately, you gotta serve somebody.