holacracy Concepts

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us

by Dan Lyons · 22 Oct 2018 · 252pp · 78,780 words

place with knotty pine walls, Chinese paintings, and an American flag. We are here for a half-day “taster workshop” to learn about something called Holacracy, a New Age management methodology that Robertson invented and which draws on philosophy, psychology, sociology, biology, cybernetics, and God knows what else. This is June

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meeting believing that Lego workshops must be the nuttiest things that businesspeople could ever do in the name of workplace transformation, but I was wrong. Holacracy is exponentially worse. It’s the closest thing to pure madness that I have ever experienced. Change represents the third of my four factors. Everything

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to be changing, all at once, from where we work to how we work. The biggest changes involve new methodologies like Agile and Lean Startup. Holacracy is like a version of those things if they were put into a blender, mixed with LSD, and packaged by Charles Manson. Despite that, Robertson

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claims that more than a thousand companies have adopted Holacracy. Reader, I pray that yours is not one of them. Robertson is thirty-eight years old. He wears a blue polo shirt and sports a

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since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution has gotten it all wrong. He wants to fix that. In 2009 he drafted a forty-six-page “Holacracy Constitution,” which has since evolved, through nine more versions, into the current thirty-nine-page document known as version 4.1.1. The constitution contains

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Declaration,” which apparently someone from your company is supposed to sign, and which actually says the following: THE RATIFIER(S) SIGNED BELOW HEREBY ADOPT THE HOLACRACY CONSTITUTION, ATTACHED HERETO AND INCORPORATED BY REFERENCE (THE “CONSTITUTION”), AS THE GOVERNANCE AND OPERATING SYSTEM WITHIN _________________________________ (THE “ORGANIZATION”), AND THEREBY CEDE THEIR AUTHORITY INTO THE

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in a video on his website. It’s a good rap, and he’s got it down. Robertson first came up with the ideas behind Holacracy and inflicted them on the employees of a software company he had started. Eventually he came to believe that the management methodology was more interesting

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would make a living by teaching people a new way to run companies. Robertson wrote the “Holacracy Constitution” and in 2015 published a book, Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World. The name holacracy comes from holarchy, a term from a 1967 book, The Ghost in the Machine, by Arthur

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, a messianic fringe figure who created something called integral theory, which purports to be “an architecture of the Kosmos.” Robertson also borrowed ideas from Agile. Holacracy purports to be not just an epic clusterfuck approach to running a company but also a pathway to personal transformation. The philosophy begins with a

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blunder. Ignoring the flub, he picks up the remote and presses on, explaining that the biggest obstacle we might face as we try to implement Holacracy at our companies is that we may encounter people who don’t like it and push back against it. “Managers measure their value based on

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my job I have to go through the brainwashing and pretend to become one of the pod people. Everywhere You Look: Change To be sure, Holacracy exists at the fringes of the fringe and will probably remain there. Chances are you won’t ever get exposed to it, but it’s

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and has two kids, and notes that at his firm, “Most partners are divorced.” What’s Your Tension? What Do You Need? Back in the Holacracy workshop, Robertson asks for volunteers who will participate in some role-play exercises so that we can see what a

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Holacracy meeting looks like. Imagine a dashing hypnotist declaring, on stage before a live audience, that he’s about to put a group of subjects into

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have an inkling of what happens next in this sad upstairs meeting room at the Wah Ying social club. As far as I can tell, Holacracy is bonkers. There are no managers, but there is a role called lead link, which is kind of like a manager, only it’s not

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matter what objection someone raises, he always has an answer, and the answer is always that whatever problem you have, you can solve it with Holacracy. I start thinking about whether this would work in the real world and imagining certain colleagues at some of my past jobs who would use

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all come to the next meeting loaded up with demands to inflict on the asshat who won the last round. A woman points out that Holacracy seems like it might make sense in a really small company, but if you tried to scale the system up to work across a big

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drive you nuts. In another role-play, we learn about governance meetings, where people “tell their tensions” and the team tries to solve them. In Holacracy, teams have tactical meetings once a week and governance meetings once a month. Each employee might be on as many as six teams, which means

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meetings every month. “Okay, so this is going to feel slow and clunky at first,” Robertson says. “That’s what happens when you’re adopting Holacracy. People are going to complain that it’s too slow, that everything takes longer. They’ll want to go back to the old way of

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doing things.” But you mustn’t do that, Robertson says. “The process gets faster,” he assures us. “Once you get used to Holacracy, you’ll all get faster at it. It’s hard. It’s like when you’re first doing yoga. It takes daily practice.” I’ve

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in all caps: I WANT TO FUCKING SHOOT MYSELF NOW. IF I WERE IN THIS MEETING FOR REAL I WOULD START SMASHING FURNITURE. Robertson claims Holacracy cultivates “a kind of mindfulness” and becomes more than just a way to get work done. “Sometimes it’s a stealth tool for personal development

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I think is cool,” he says. “It has helped people with their personal lives and relationships with their spouses.” In fact Robertson says he uses Holacracy at home with his wife. “If my wife brings up a tension, then it’s her turn to process her tension, and I help her

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, ‘Okay, now can we address one of my tensions.’” Robertson’s company, HolacracyOne, has twenty employees. Robertson has certified fifty Holacracy trainers who work independently. More than one thousand companies have adopted Holacracy. Small pilot programs are running at Dannon, the yogurt company; Ernst & Young, the consultancy; and Starwood, the hotel chain

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. Robertson admits that the transition to Holacracy can be painful. When Zappos, the online shoe retailer, insisted in 2015 that employees commit

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to using Holacracy or leave the company, nearly 30 percent walked out. The ones who remained were so unhappy that

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insane and completely disregards employees and reality in decision making, but parties are fun.” For all its hippy-dippy hoo-ha about empowerment and freedom, Holacracy turns out to be doctrinaire and authoritarian. Everyone must follow the rules, and there are lots of rules. Instead of reducing internal politics and eliminating

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and treated like human lab rats. They hated that the system itself was more important than the people working inside it. “Zappos is struggling with Holacracy because humans aren’t designed to operate like software” is how Aimee Groth, a writer at Quartz, put it. Instead of admitting failure, Zappos CEO

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and founder Tony Hsieh doubled down on Holacracy and added a new concept called Teal, which was created by Frederic Laloux, a Belgian business guru and former McKinsey consultant. Teal isn’t just

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new approach to running organizations. Most CEOs have an intuitive sense that there has to be a better way to run a company. They see Holacracy, and they feel drawn to a new paradigm. It’s more dynamic, more lean, more agile.” It sounds great to be lean and agile. But

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not going to make any company perform any better. Recently I spoke to a CEO whose predecessor had adopted Holacracy. The first thing the new guy did was throw it all out. “Holacracy,” he says, “is the illusion that the natural state of things is reverse entropy. If you just leave things

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efficient. There is some cosmological evidence to the contrary.” The poor bastards who worked at the company had spent months learning how to work in Holacracy, and now had to unlearn everything they’d learned and go back to the old way, which they had previously unlearned. We’re perilously close

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, Heike, and Jochen I. Menges. “The Acceleration Trap.” Harvard Business Review, April 2010 Issue. https://hbr.org/2010/04/the-acceleration-trap. Holacracy website. Homepage, accessed May 31, 2018. https://www.holacracy.org. Reingold, Jennifer. “How a Radical Shift Left Zappos Reeling.” Fortune, March 4, 2016. http://fortune.com/zappos-tony-hsieh

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-holacracy. Rogers, Christina. “A Pioneer of the Open Office Helps Ford Rethink the Car.” Wall Street Journal, November 29, 2016. https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-

Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness

by Frederic Laloux and Ken Wilber · 9 Feb 2014 · 436pp · 141,321 words

Fritz Lang, after Galuska had tried unsuccessfully to apply his vision for a holistic approach to mental health problems in traditional mental health hospitals. Holacracy Organizational operating model Holacracy is an organizational operating model, originally developed by Brian Robertson and his team at Ternary Software, a Philadelphia-based start-up. After transferring

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approaches might be applied. Buurtzorg’s elegant integrative process is one example, and we’ll encounter another one later in this chapter when we discuss Holacracy’s governance process. It is worth repeating that these decision-making processes work without consensus. I have noticed that for some reason, many people

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for the kind of culture where experimentation and change was embraced. However, the actual experimentation process at the level we engaged in to get to Holacracy was very taxing. Things would change under you: one day we are doing it this way, the next day we’d completely change something

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changing around here continually.”53 In time, from the crazy experimentation was distilled a sophisticated and coherent set of structures and practices that Robertson calls “Holacracy.” When Robertson hired a new management team and exited Ternary Software, he created HolacracyOne, a consulting and training firm dedicated to refining and spreading the

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identity between people and their job titles. In holacratic language, people don’t have a job, but fill a number of granular roles. Where Holacracy goes further than other organizations is in the elegant process through which roles are defined. When someone senses that a new role must be created

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It ensures that no valid objection is overlooked, and it truly builds on the collective intelligence of a team. You might have noticed how similar Holacracy’s governance process is to the one nurses use at Buurtzorg when they discuss important topics. In both cases, the goal is to not to

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invited to process any tension; “it’s not my problem” is not an acceptable attitude. Total responsibility can sound daunting, but the experience of Holacracy and Morning Star is that people grow to love it. People’s concerns are no longer limited to their scope of responsibility; they can take

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four-person partnership in the field of organizational development consulting based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, sets salaries in this way. (The company, which works with Holacracy’s principles and practices, attracted some attention when two of its partners participated in the launch of a thought-provoking podcast series called “Waking up

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of the shadow they cast, they would wield their power more carefully and would create healthier and more productive organizations. Brian Robertson, the founder of Holacracy, put it well in a blog post: We see attempts for leaders to develop to be more conscious, aware, awake, servant leaders that are

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a child for that matter), our colleagues will quickly let us know they won’t have any of it. Brian Robertson, the founder of Holacracy, sometimes uses another set of archetypes to talk about the power of self-management to shift relationships to a healthier level—helping us to move

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to be rescued anyway.72 Self-management greatly reduces the subtle levels of fear in organizations that prevent us from being ourselves. Some organizations, like Holacracy and Morning Star, focus clinically on self-management and feel little need to add other practices to encourage individual and collective wholeness. Other organizations find

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Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. Morning Star has documents called Organizational Vision, Colleague Principles, and Statement of General Business Philosophy; FAVI has its fiches, and Holacracy its Constitution. These documents provide a vision for a safe and productive workplace. They give colleagues a vocabulary to discuss healthy relationships, and they draw

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step further: for certain meetings, they have adopted formal decision-making practices (see here for an example from Buurtzorg and here for an example from Holacracy). These mechanisms ensure that everybody’s voice is heard and that no one can dominate the proceedings. Practical, workable decisions can be made quickly

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and efficiently even for touchy, complex subjects; cutting through the threat of endless discussions in pursuit of consensus. Holacracy, in particular, has refined these practices to a wonderful degree. As a side-benefit, Brian Robertson notes, meetings have become powerful settings for personal growth

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. All of the meeting structures [in Holacracy] are designed to shine a light on our stuff, our projections, our ego … to make it all just visible, clear and transparent, not judge

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, their frustrations, their fear, from jumping in and dominating the organization, from derailing the natural process of working together towards a purpose. Everyone loves Holacracy when it stops that process for someone else and hates it when it does it to them (Robertson laughs), and this is certainly my experience

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Green cultural practices described in the bestseller Delivering Happiness, written by CEO Tony Hsieh. The 1,500-employee company is currently making the leap to Holacracy, which will make it the largest holacratic organization to date.) Onboarding The onboarding process in many organizations today is rather basic. People might receive a

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we just need to listen, partner with it, join it in its dance, and discover where it will take us. Brian Robertson, the founder of Holacracy, uses the term evolutionary purpose to indicate that organizations, just like us, have a calling and an evolutionary energy to move toward that calling: What

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Only the signals sensed at the top are acted upon, but unfortunately these signals are often distorted and far removed from reality on the ground. Holacracy’s Brian Robertson uses a powerful analogy to talk about organizations filtering people’s ability to sense their environment: A transformative experience [happened] for me

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Instead of trying to predict and control (the goal behind all planning and budgeting practices), Teal Organizations try to sense and respond. Brian Robertson from Holacracy uses a powerful metaphor to contrast the two approaches: Imagine if we rode a bicycle like we try to manage our companies today. It would

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and control. And the challenge with that: it often gives us more illusion of control than real control. And we do want real control. Holacracy tries to bake into the core of the organization a paradigm shift to a steering modality we call dynamic steering, which is based not on

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at any point. These principles are at the heart of lean manufacturing and agile software development, two approaches that have revolutionized their respective fields. Holacracy’s governance process and Buurtzorg’s decision-making process show that they can be embedded in all departments of an organization. In both cases, if

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a culture that keeps people from using their weapons. This is the experience that David Allen, of Getting Things Done fame, had when he adopted Holacracy in his consulting and training firm, the David Allen Company: As we’ve distributed accountability down and throughout the organization, I’ve had much

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how such a view, which challenges a fundamental assumption of the capitalist system, could one day be integrated into legal frameworks. Some experiments are underway. Holacracy, for instance, has drafted a constitution that a board can adopt and that henceforth becomes binding, even to future shareholders. It gives shareholders a legitimate

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say in matters related to finance, but prevents them from unilaterally imposing a strategy, or from reverting the organization to traditional management practices. Holacracy has done the legal footwork to make its constitution fit within US corporate law, and it is currently adapting the constitution to legal systems in

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ownership of organizations. Only time will tell if and how such a scenario will play out. For now, initiatives such as B-Corps and Holacracy’s constitution provide interesting avenues for leaders wanting to ground their organizations in a legal framework more agreeable to a Teal perspective. NECESSARY, BUT NOT

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contrasts her experience there with other settings where leaders were likely equally or more enlightened, but the structures were not: I was first drawn to Holacracy through a sense of frustration at repeated cycles of coming together with like-minded people who shared aspirations to transform culture in meaningful ways. Gradually

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Though much of this may still be true about me, it still doesn’t take away the profoundly liberating alternative I’ve discovered through practicing Holacracy, and especially through becoming a partner of HolacracyOne. Joining HolacracyOne has been utterly catalytic on all levels of my being. Playing politics is not

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healthy family structure—again, not because the “family members” are particularly psychologically intact; like me, they are very human—but because our practice of Holacracy sources our interactions to arise in a clear space, free of baggage and politics. In the neuroscience of human development, there’s a lot of

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with a minute of silence or a round of thanking, but you can also choose a structured decision-making process, such as those practiced by Holacracy and Buurtzorg. Two practices related to purpose If you put your energy into founding a business, a nonprofit, a school, or a hospital, then

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most appropriate for your organization: Will it be self-managing teams, like Buurtzorg or FAVI? A structure based on individual contracting, like Morning Star? Holacracy’s structure of nested teams? The industry you work in, the type of work you do, is likely to call for one type of structure

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company do to help? Pre-existing template (switch day) A third approach consists of implementing an existing and proven set of self-managing practices. Holacracy is a natural candidate in this case. It is an elegant and interlocking set of practices for self-management that was pioneered originally with Ternary

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and your colleagues in the practices as well as facilitate meetings while you get used to the system. Adopting an existing set of practices like Holacracy can make the transition much smoother and faster. You benefit from accumulated insight gained by people who have put innovative practices to the test

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and refined them over and over again. To get going with Holacracy, you need to define a starting structure of nested circles, and you must determine a switch day where the new structure, practices, and processes

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take effect and the old cease to exist (typically the day the organization’s founder or CEO adopts Holacracy’s constitution). The starting structure doesn’t need to be perfect in any way—to keep things simple it can even mimic the old hierarchical

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hope, given you some food for thought about your organization’s journey to embrace Evolutionary-Teal ways of operating. The experiences of FAVI, AES, and Holacracy show that in practice, the transition is unlikely to be orderly and linear. It will be iterative in nature, at times difficult, and at

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also the more clear-minded and determined you come across, the easier the transition will come about. There is another extraordinary lesson that FAVI, AES, Holacracy, and others offer: if a CEO truly wants the shift to happen, and offers the right presence, it will happen. There may be initial

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document called a “Colleague Letter of Understanding” (CLOU) that records the different roles and commitments that the person has agreed to. 3. Nested teams Holacracy is a self-management approach first pioneered at Ternary Software, a Philadelphia-based company, which has now turned into a fully documented operating model. It

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the relationship between teams and the supporting structure. In the first model, all teams work side by side, with a minimum supporting structure. In Holacracy, circles are part of a nested structure. Let’s imagine a 7,000-person pharmaceutical company structured in a holacratic manner. The overall purpose of

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, banks, insurance companies, car manufacturers, aerospace companies, and airline companies are likely to have long and deep value chains. For these types of companies, Holacracy’s structure of nested teams might be particularly appropriate, as it allows an overall purpose to be broken down into successively less complex and more

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org/2011/12/first-lets-fire-all-the-managers, accessed April 11, 2012. 51 Ibid. 52 Brian Robertson, “Dialog: The History of Holacracy,” Holacracy Community of Practice, October 2011, www.holacracy.org/resources, accessed Febuary 24, 2012. 53 Ibid. 54 Brian Robertson, interviewed by Jeff Klein, En*theos Radio, “It’s Just Good

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What Matters Now (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2012), 176-177. Chapter 2.4: Striving for wholeness (general processes) 72 Brian Robertson, “Holacracy: Empowerment Built In,” Holacracy Blogs, January 16, 2013, www.holacracy.org/blog, accessed January 20, 2013. 73 A similar effect is at play in schools where babies are brought into the

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Soul,” Journal for Staff Development, National Staff Development Council, Spring 2008. 85 Careful readers might have noticed the beautiful paradox around role and soul. Holacracy insists we should separate role from soul (stop confusing our identity with our job title). This separation is a necessary first step. Only then can

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need a Business Plan,” April 14, 2011. 107 Robertson interview. 108 Brian Robertson “Outvoting the Low Voltage Light,” blog post, July 9, 2012, http://holacracy.org/blog/outvoting-the-low-voltage-light, accessed November 4, 2012. 109 Judi Neal, “Spreading Spiritual Wisdom: Business Leader Tami Simon, CEO of Sounds True

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prospects, then people will be tempted to reopen decisions not to further an organization’s purpose, but for their own benefit. The decision processes at Holacracy and Buurtzorg are explicitly designed to prevent ego-hijack from happening. A number of rules about what makes a “workable” solution and what “objections”

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Bob Koski, interviewed by one of Sun’s operators, internal Sun Hydraulics material. 123 Brian Robertson, “Differentiating Organization & Tribe,” blog post, August 28, 2013, http://holacracy.org/blog/differentiating-organization-tribe, accessed August 30, 2013. Chapter 3.1: Necessary conditions 124 Fishman and Fishman, The Common Good Corporation, 58-60. 125

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Ibid., 31. 126 Bakke, Joy at Work, 55-56. 127 “Holacracy Distributes Heroes,” YouTube video, posted by HolacracyOne, January 7, 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch—v=QGphlvr4jdE, accessed June 16, 2013. 128 Conversation with the

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You

by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms · 2 Apr 2018 · 416pp · 100,130 words

community. What Buurtzorg gets right that Silicon Valley got wrong An ocean and a continent away, another experiment with self-managing teams has taken place. Holacracy is a radical new management philosophy and system, invented by software engineers, that digital outfits like Zappos and Medium have been enthralled by in recent

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years. Zappos took it so much to heart that it restructured the entire company, eliminating bosses and departments altogether. On the surface, Holacracy appears very new power, offering a “new way of running an organization that removes power from a management hierarchy and distributes it across clear roles

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, which can then be executed autonomously, without a micromanaging boss.” It boasts more flexible roles for staff and greater transparency. Holacracy might sound a lot like Buurtzorg, only with better software. It is far from it. In fact, the differences between the two models help us

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what the rest of us might try to emulate. Nurses like Madelon and her teams have huge freedom to define their own working methods while Holacracy is highly structured and directive, perhaps more so than many old power organizations. A sample instruction from the forty-page

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Holacracy constitution reads: “As a Partner assigned to a Role, you have the authority to control and regulate each Domain of your Role. You may do

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of your Domains, by considering the request and allowing or withholding permission.” Restrictions and protocols, with a good sprinkle of jargon, become the focus under Holacracy, not the work itself. Medium abandoned Holacracy after initially embracing it with gusto, saying it was “getting in the way of the work,” and

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Holacracy is partly blamed for the departure of an unprecedented nearly one-third of the Zappos workforce in just one year, 2015, and for the company’

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s being left off Fortune magazine’s annual list of the best places to work for the first time in eight years. Holacracy is like new power for robots. Julia Culen describes her experience when a long-standing Viennese-based consulting firm of which she was a managing

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partner adopted Holacracy: “It felt like being part of a code…an algorithm that is optimized for machines, but not for humans. Instead of feeling more whole, self

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. BuurtzorgWeb: “Buurtzorg Web,” July 2017. www.buurtzorg.com. “new way of running”: Benjamin Snyder, “Holacracy and 3 of the Most Unusual Management Practices Around,” Fortune, June 2, 2015. “As a Partner assigned”: Holacracy, “Holacracy Constitution,” HolacracyOne, LLC, 2013. www.holacracy.org. “getting in the way of the work”: Aimee Groth, “Zappos Is Struggling with

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Holacracy Because Humans Aren’t Designed to Operate like Software,” Quartz, December 21, 2016. “It felt like

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being part of a code”: Julia Culen, “Holacracy: Not Safe Enough to Try,” Medium, June 27, 2015. “During the next year”: Deloitte, “The Future of the Workforce: Critical Drivers and Challenges,” Deloitte, July

Wonder Boy: Tony Hsieh, Zappos, and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley

by Angel Au-Yeung and David Jeans · 25 Apr 2023 · 427pp · 134,098 words

Project that was meant to eliminate job titles and force people to make up their own roles—kind of like a tribe, Tony would say. Holacracy, as this structure was called, would also further remove Tony from the spotlight, and shift responsibility for the neighborhood away from him. “Tony doesn’t

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really like conflict,” said Maggie Hsu, who was assigned to lead the rollout of the management system at the Downtown Project. “Holacracy was this way to diffuse that because he wasn’t the bad guy or central decision maker.” The concept of

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Holacracy was created by Brian Robertson, a software developer who had been trying to reduce management decisions at a company he started. After seeing him at

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Downtown Project employees to school them on how to give up their titles and, seemingly, their designated responsibilities. Robertson’s rules were governed by the Holacracy Constitution, which he made up, and contained language that was more akin to a scientific study than plain English. That was frustrating for the hundreds

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do than decipher its nonsense. When conflicts arose, for example, practitioners were expected to engage in an act called “processing tensions,” an act that the Holacracy Constitution defined by the following statement: A Partner duly filling a Role shall regularly compare the current expression of such Role’s Purpose and enactment

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the Downtown Project could never quite grasp how to use the system or implement it. Instead it created more friction among the community. * * * As the Holacracy rollout sputtered, some of the Downtown Project’s bets were not paying off. A slow-moving exodus had grown into a steady stream of tech

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he was eager to protect it from anything that might dare invade and disrupt his safe haven. * * * It had been two years since Tony announced Holacracy’s roll-out at Zappos, but the company had yet to reach the state of radical self-management he envisioned. In March 2015, he sent

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a 4,700-word company-wide email. “We’ve been operating partially under Holacracy and partially under the legacy management hierarchy in parallel for over a year now,” Tony started in his note. “Having one foot in one world

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, increased autonomy, and increased efficiency,” he continued, “we are going to take a ‘rip the bandaid’ approach.” In other words, employees either had to adopt Holacracy or take a buyout. Zappos lost 210 out of 1,503 employees over the following months. Some Zapponians had started wondering whether Tony should resign

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from Zappos. “The brewing employee discontent reflects the paradox at the heart of any company’s move to Holacracy,” read a New York Times story about the debacle. “For all the talk of self-management and consensus building, the decision to go down this

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path was Mr. Hsieh’s alone.” Tony remained defensive about Holacracy to a press that was unwilling to accept it. “The media has kind of portrayed it as ‘there’s just total chaos,’” he said during

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with Kara Swisher in 2016, the fissures in Tony’s philosophies were starting to appear. And as the public punches started again, this time targeting Holacracy and claiming that he was running a cult, Tony’s sanguine exterior started to crack. * * * In Airstream Park, his closest confidants started taking notice. In

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When Tony had been leaping from one chapter to another—building Zappos, the Amazon acquisition, the Delivering Happiness book, the launch of the Downtown Project, Holacracy—there was one man by his side the entire time: Fred Mossler. Since the early days of Zappos, Fred had been Tony’s right-hand

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years of unconventionality under Tony’s wing, he simply could not stomach moving into a trailer and raising his kids in a pseudo-commune. As Holacracy continued its troubled rollout at Zappos, Fred supported the effort internally by sending encouraging company-wide emails while listening to employees’ gripes with the new

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did,” Fred said during an interview in early 2016. “In reading all the exit interviews and speaking with people leaving, the exodus is less about Holacracy/dissatisfaction and more about the opportunity to pursue other passions or fulfill other goals in life. The fact we can make such an offer and

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. The two had just met on billionaire Richard Branson’s Necker Island at another conference, and they had connected on a variety of topics, from Holacracy to mindfulness. Jewel was passionate about mental health, and she told Victor that having Tony at this panel would give it more credibility among the

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a long table with a few other residents, drinking Fernet. Victor sat down, and the two dove into a conversation about Holacracy at Zappos. Tony told Victor he wanted Holacracy to evolve into a new system called market-based dynamics, in which every team would be run like its own independent business

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festivals to conferences. When Tony drank a shot of Fernet, Tyler was usually right there with him. When Tony went up onstage to talk about Holacracy, Tyler was sitting in the audience. In many ways, they were polar opposites. Tony was introverted at heart, while Tyler was effusive and loved to

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in 2009, he sold Zappos. Now another ten years had passed. He was forty-five years old and Zappos had just celebrated its twentieth anniversary. Holacracy had failed to take hold, so Tony was now steering the company toward market-based dynamics. The transition was still sluggish at best, and he

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, “The Story of the Man Who’s Flattening the World of Corporate Hierarchies,” Business Insider, January 16, 2014, https://qz.com/167145/the-story-of-holacracys-founder-began-when-he-started-coding-at-age-6/. “strategic partners and hiring brilliant senior talent”: Lacy, Sara, “More Bad News for Vegas Tech Fund

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October 23, 2022. 4,700-word company-wide email: Groth, Aimee, “Internal Memo: Zappos Is Offering Severance to Employees Who Aren’t All In on Holacracy,” Quartz, March 26, 2015, https://qz.com/370616/internal-memo-zappos-is-offering-severance-to-employees-who-arent-all-in-with

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-holacracy/. Zappos lost 210 out of 1,503 employees: Usufzy, Pashtana, “200 Accept Buyouts at Zappos After Management Changes,” Las Vegas Sun, May 5, 2015, https://

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community and conditions for businesses in core values and death of Tony and drinking and events and financials and Fred Mossler and Groth book on Holacracy and layoffs and Life Is Beautiful and problems outlined real estate portfolio and startups and suicides and Tony and Fred first plan renovation of Tony

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Harvard University Business School Hawaii Hawk, Tony Hayashi, Kami Henderson, Nevada Henrikson, James Henry, Mike Hill, David Hilton, Paris HitRecord Hof, Wim “the Ice Man” Holacracy Hollis, Brandon homelessness Hong Kong Hsieh, Andrew Chia-Pei “Andy” (brother) childhood and youth and death of Tony and education of Elizabeth Pezzello and Life

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friendship with Jenn Lim and friendship with Ying Liu and Gobbler, The, created by happiness mantra and Harvard classmates cruise and hero’s journeys and Holacracy and image and physical appearance of Internet Marketing Solutions and Jewel’s attempts to help job at Oracle and jobs at Harvard and Kanye West

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brought to Zappos by Nacho Daddy opened by Ogden building and remarriage and family and Tony’s psychotic break and travels with Tony and Zappos Holacracy campaign and Zappos launch and Zappos leadership team and Zappos sale to Amazon and Mossler, Kalei Mossler, Meghan Motel 6 (Las Vegas) Mount Everest Mount

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financial crisis of 2008 and founding of, and early growth founding of, idea pitched by Nick Swinmurn Fred departs from Fred joins, as shoe guy Holacracy and Jewel’s Whole Human program for Kanye West and Las Vegas headquarters in old City Hall market-based dynamics and Mark Guadagnoli hired to

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?

by Aaron Dignan · 1 Feb 2019 · 309pp · 81,975 words

emerged in the last half century, each promising to revolutionize work as we know it. Lean Manufacturing. Total Quality Management. ISO 9000. Six Sigma. Sociocracy. Holacracy. The Lean Startup. The list goes on and on. Each was, in its own way, a piece of an operating system. Some were misguided from

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process he developed has been refined over the years by practitioners of Sociocracy and was reintroduced in a more structured form by the creators of Holacracy as Integrative Decision Making or IDM. IDM contains a series of “rounds” that act as an algorithm for processing a proposal. Above all, the method

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propose local changes to structure, strategy, resources . . . anything that will help the organization pursue its purpose. Thousands of organizations around the world that practice Sociocracy, Holacracy, or other forms of participatory governance are doing this today. Imagine every team in your organization continuously and deliberately tweaking, not just your products and

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and put it to use. Twenty-five years later, the term tension surfaced in an organizational context once again, this time in the context of Holacracy. In his book, founder Brian Robertson talks about tension as a signal that can guide us. “When we feel that sense of frustration at a

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?”: Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization (New York: Currency, 1990), 140. “gap between how things are”: Brian Robertson, Holacracy (New York: Macmillan, 2015), 5. fifty-three words for snow: David Robson, “There Really Are 50 Eskimo Words for ‘Snow,’” The Washington Post, January 14

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, Frank, 46 Herzberg, Frederick, 165 hierarchies, 77–78, 258 High Line, 188 Hillaker, Harry, 88 Hillman, James, 36 hiring, 79, 142–43 Hoffman, Reid, 88 Holacracy, 71, 122, 202 HolacracyOne, 89 Human Side of Enterprise, The (McGregor), 39–41 Husney, Jordan, 89 Huxley, Aldous, 22 hygiene factors, 165, 173 ICBD (Intentions

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World

by Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott · 9 May 2016 · 515pp · 126,820 words

are. Implications for the Blockchain Economy: As an economic design principle, enforcing rights must start with clarifying rights. In the field of management science, the holacracy movement is an interesting, if not controversial, example of how members of organizations are defining the work that needs to be done and then assigning

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or services. It’s about its efforts to cultivate a company of its own, pioneering important new ground in management science along the lines of holacracy, a collaborative rather than hierarchical process for defining and aligning the work to be done. “While I don’t want us to implement

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holacracy as is—it feels way too rigid and structured to me—we are working to incorporate many of its philosophies in our structure and processes,”

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. Empowerment, the real decentralization of power, is an important focus in business; and companies have experimented or implemented new concepts ranging from matrix management to holacracy—with varying degrees of success. In fact, there is widespread agreement that when firms distribute responsibility, authority, and power, the result will typically be positive

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contracts enhance those competencies and lower costs? From the get-go, ConsenSys was a blockchain business. CEO Joe Lubin embraces the technology and a modified holacracy, and we can see the seven design principles at work. 5. What are the risks of opportunism where a partner might encroach on fundamental parts

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(3) (August 1992): 249–62; www.jstor.org/stable/3146375. 47. Interview with Haluk Kulin, June 9, 2015. 48. John Paul Titlow, “Fire Your Boss: Holacracy’s Founder on the Flatter Future of Work,” Fast Company, Mansueto Ventures LLC, July 9, 2015; www.fastcompany.com/3048338/the-future-of-work/fire

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-your-boss-holacracys-founder-on-the-flatter-future-of-work. 49. World Bank, September 2, 2015; www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2015/04/15/massive-drop

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–6 High latency, 256–57 Hill, Austin, 28 design principles, 38, 40–41, 43, 51 financial services, 63, 65–67, 76 implementation challenges, 262, 272 Holacracy, 48–49, 88 Hollywood Stock Exchange, 84 Home management, 161, 275 Homomorphic encryption, 28 Honduras, 193–95 Honesty, 10, 11 Horizontal search, 97 Humanitarian aid

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy

by Nathan Schneider · 10 Sep 2018 · 326pp · 91,559 words

a republic for code, and my computer runs on it. Inspired by such communities, tech-industry consultants promote new management philosophies with such names as Holacracy, Agile, and Teal.6 These feats of dynamic, distributed workflow seem to outstrip the democracy of most big, established cooperatives nowadays, which tend to have

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carbon-copied their hierarchies from industrial-age bureaucracies. Techie capitalism can appear to be out-cooperating the co-ops. For instance, Holacracy: borrowing a name from Arthur Koestler’s concept of the holon—“a whole that is part of a larger whole”—it proposes to replace the

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top-down hierarchy of the industrial corporation with the free flow of an open-source project. There is some hierarchy in Holacracy—officially capitalized, a registered trademark of the company HolacracyOne—but, rather than the metaphor of a pyramid, the system relies on nested “circles.” Rather than

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“roles,” within which the worker has authority to make relevant decisions, whether the CEO likes them or not. For bosses used to command-and-control, Holacracy means giving up the power to micromanage. Meetings are short and highly regimented. Rather than mouthing off at will, the people formerly called managers have

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Zappos and Medium—though in investor-oriented settings like these, it has a tendency to implode.7 Maybe the contradictions become too easily apparent. Although Holacracy grants even the lowliest employees autonomy in their domain, that autonomy must always accord with the rules of the game, with the overriding purpose of

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the company. The purpose is everything in Holacracy. And, for most sizable tech companies, that purpose is to furnish wealth for investors. Self-determination gets dangled before people but then yanked away as

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Utopianism (University of Chicago Press, 2006), and Judy Malloy, ed., Social Media Archeology and Poetics (MIT Press, 2016). 6. Coleman, Coding Freedom; Brian J. Robertson, Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World (Henry Holt, 2015); Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next

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), 173–175 Hicks, Charity, 76 High Plains Food Cooperative, 152–153 higher education, 66, 68–71, 154 History of Cooperation (Holyoake), 46 Hock, Dee, 80 Holacracy, 139–140 HolacracyOne, 140 Holyoake, George Jacob, 46, 48–49, 66 Hoover, Melissa, 70 housing co-ops, 98–100 Hsu, Jerone, 32, 35, 36 (photo

Extreme Teams: Why Pixar, Netflix, AirBnB, and Other Cutting-Edge Companies Succeed Where Most Fail

by Robert Bruce Shaw, James Foster and Brilliance Audio · 14 Oct 2017 · 280pp · 82,355 words

period of time and then succumb to competitive challenges or their own self-inflicted wounds. Zappos has recently introduced a bold self-management approach called holacracy that has the potential to take the firm to the next level of performance—or undermine the success it has had to date. None of

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involves his dislike of hierarchy. He is now implementing a new organizational approach in Zappos with an emphasis on self-managing teams, called holacracy.17 In the simplest terms, holacracy eliminates most of the authority structures found in traditional firms (including titles). This radical approach is designed to create a company of

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of formal group processes to surface, vet and act on new ideas, replacing the chain of command that is found in most firms. Hsieh believes holacracy will spark innovation in Zappos and allow it to thrive over the long-term. As founder and CEO of the company, Hsieh is implementing his

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are proven over time to be productive or not. Tony Hsieh’s willingness to try new approaches in pushing Zappos forward is admirable. But implementing holacracy is not simply getting people to believe what he believes. His organizational model will be tested against the results it produces in the marketplace with

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P. Webb, “Innovation Lessons from Pixar: An interview with Oscar-Winning Director Brad Bird,” McKinsey Quarterly, April 2008. 17Steve Denning, “Making Sense of Zappos and Holacracy,” Forbes, January 15, 2014. A more detailed description of the approach can be found at Ethan Bernstein et al., “Beyond the

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Holacracy Hype,” Harvard Business Review July-August (2016). We will not know for few years if the approach will work at Zappos. My sense is that

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18 percent of the employee population took the company’s buyout offer in 2015, with 6 percent citing holacracy as the reason they were leaving. See Gregory Ferenstein, “The Zappos Exodus Wasn’t About Holacracy, Says Tony Hsieh,” Fast Company, January 19, 2016. Also see David Gelles, “The Zappos Exodus Continues After

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Heckscher, Charles, on common goals Heilman, Madeline E. Herrin, Jessica, on hiring highly aligned hiring process at Airbnb cultural fit in at Pixar at Zappos holacracy Holbrook, Richard, on conflict House of Cards (television show) Housman, Michael Hsieh, Tony on culture on customer service as founder of Zappos influence of, at

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, obsession with Workaholics Anonymous Worn Wear program Wrzesniewski, Amy, on meaning at work Xerox Zappos accountability at communal culture at culture at hiring process at holacracy at obsession at playful culture at relationships at turnover at Zappos Insiders Zenger, John zones, for teams ABOUT THE AUTHOR ROBERT BRUCE SHAW is a

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It)

by Salim Ismail and Yuri van Geest · 17 Oct 2014 · 292pp · 85,151 words

with companies placing their most empowered and proactive employees on the front line. A good example of this trend towards Autonomy is a company called Holacracy, which has taken Agile techniques from the software world and the Lean Startup approach and extended them to all aspects of the organization

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. Holacracy (a concept as well as the company’s name) is defined as a social technology or system of organizational governance, in which authority and decision-

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hierarchy. The system combines Experimentation, OKRs, openness, transparency and Autonomy. The following table compares traditional organizational characteristics with autonomous organizations like those advocated by Holacracy: Without Holacracy With Holacracy Central control and authority Distributed control and authority Predict and plan for long term Dynamic and flexible: changes can and are constantly occuring Hierarchic

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people who fulfill their role Organizing people Organizing work Instrumental use of human relationships to serve Organizational goals Clear separation between people, relationships and roles Holacracy is said to increase agility, efficiency, transparency, innovation and accountability within an organization. The approach encourages individual team members to take initiative and gives them

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, small, independent and interdisciplinary teams are critical to future organizations, especially at the edges. A final note: Approaches towards employee autonomy, like those found at Holacracy, are not just for small companies. Large organizations, including Zappos and Semler, have also adopted this structure across much bigger operations. Harvard professor Rosabeth Moss

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finalized (see Step 10). Experimentation: Establish culture of experimentation and constant iteration. Be willing to fail and pivot as needed. Autonomy: Implement lite version of Holacracy. Start with the General Company Circle as a first step; then move onto governance meetings. Implement the GitHub technical and organizational model with radical openness

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30 percent of work time on their own projects. Hard to decentralize art due to its dependency on its visionary founder. Moving towards implementing the Holacracy model (OKRs, Lean, open, transparent). Social Technologies: Activity streams via Viadesk software and extensive use of wikis. Connected 3D printers and advanced Cisco videoconferencing in

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API Developer Challenge and the Winter Hackathon), and awarded money and gift certificates to the winners [Engagement]. In December 2013, CEO Tony Hsieh adopted the Holacracy approach and shook up the 1,500-person organization by moving to full Autonomy. After six months, 225 employees had been transitioned from the old

The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset That Drives Extraordinary Results

by Andrew McAfee · 14 Nov 2023 · 381pp · 113,173 words

work fits in with the overall strategy and goals of the company. Footnotes 1 In late 2013 the online shoe retailer Zappos began experimenting with holacracy, a management system that did away with hierarchy and well-defined management roles in favor of “distributed authority.” It was not universally popular. When CEO

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new system, 18 percent of the workforce instead took a buyout. In January 2000, the Quartz website announced that “Zappos has quietly backed away from holacracy.” 2 Ford was the second-largest company in America, which was by far the largest economy in the world, having grown by more than 50

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-following-its-radical-no-bosses-approach/. 7 “quietly backed away”: Aimee Groth, “Zappos Has Quietly Backed Away from Holacracy,” Quartz, January 29, 2020, https://qz.com/work/1776841/zappos-has-quietly-backed-away-from-holacracy. 8 “promiscuous distribution”: Lawrence H. Summers, “Why Americans Don’t Trust Government,” Washington Post, May 26, 2016