Gyroscopic Investing

TennPaGa wrote: Valve Software has no management hierarchy at all. 

From their employee manual:

Hierarchy is great for maintaining predictability and repeatability. It simplifies planning and makes it easier to control a large group of people from the top down, which is why military organizations rely on it so heavily. But when you’re an entertainment company that’s spent the last decade going out of its way to recruit the most intelligent, innovative, talented people on Earth, telling them to sit at a desk and do what they’re told obliterates 99 percent of their value. We want innovators, and that means maintaining an environment where they’ll flourish.

That’s why Valve is flat. It’s our shorthand way of saying that we don’t have any management, and nobody “reports to”? anybody else. We do have a founder/president, but even he isn’t your manager. This company is yours to steer—toward opportunities and away from risks. You have the power to green-light projects. You have the power to ship products.

Are there other organizations like Valve? That is, one having 200-500 members, but no management structure?

I also have a simple question, which is not meant to be snarky: If total freedom from external control (i.e. anarchy) is the optimal state for people, as some here contend, why are there not more examples of completely flat organizations like Valve?

(I grant that maybe there are more; I'm not sure how to discover them, though... also, I can't remember how I learned about Valve)

Perhaps the answer is also in their employee manual:

A flat structure removes every organizational barrier between your work and the customer enjoying that work. Every company will tell you that “the customer is boss,”? but here that statement has weight. There’s no red tape stopping you from figuring out for yourself what our customers want, and then giving it to them. If you’re thinking to yourself, “Wow, that sounds like a lot of responsibility,”? you’re right. And that’s why hiring is the single most important thing you will ever do at Valve (see “Hiring ,”? on page 43). Any time you interview a potential hire, you need to ask yourself not only if they’re talented or collaborative but also if they’re capable of literally running this company, because they will be.

My read: such a structure is not for everybody.

TennPaGa wrote: Perhaps the answer is also in their employee manual:

A flat structure removes every organizational barrier between your work and the customer enjoying that work. Every company will tell you that “the customer is boss,”? but here that statement has weight. There’s no red tape stopping you from figuring out for yourself what our customers want, and then giving it to them. If you’re thinking to yourself, “Wow, that sounds like a lot of responsibility,”? you’re right. And that’s why hiring is the single most important thing you will ever do at Valve (see “Hiring ,”? on page 43). Any time you interview a potential hire, you need to ask yourself not only if they’re talented or collaborative but also if they’re capable of literally running this company, because they will be.

My read: such a structure is not for everybody.

TennPaGa wrote: OK, I get that it's not for everybody, but, based on some things that people here write, I'd guess that such an arrangement would be highly preferred by more than 300 people in the whole country.  So why aren't there more Valves?

TennPaGa wrote: OK, I get that it's not for everybody, but, based on some things that people here write, I'd guess that such an arrangement would be highly preferred by more than 300 people in the whole country.  So why aren't there more Valves?

Libertarian666 wrote:

TennPaGa wrote: OK, I get that it's not for everybody, but, based on some things that people here write, I'd guess that such an arrangement would be highly preferred by more than 300 people in the whole country.  So why aren't there more Valves?

There are a lot of single-person companies, which sort of by definition aren't very hierarchical. 

Actually, my previous political rant doesn't apply to private enterprise, where everyone is a volunteer and no one can be parasitized without his consent. I was just feeling particularly cynical at that moment, so please excuse that.

The real answer is that in the free market, most companies need a fair amount of capital to operate, and the people who supply the capital ("capitalists") tend to hire people who will perform duties assigned by the capitalist or by others appointed by the capitalist. Is this necessary in every case? No, but in a lot of cases that's what happens.

If ordinary citizens had a small but reliable annuity, too modest to live comfortably but enough to prevent destitution, then at the margin, we’d expect people who currently seek or accept unfulfilling, underpaid work to opt for entrepreneurship, or education, or art, or child-rearing, or just hold out for a better gig. “VC for the people”? would combine a reduction in labor supply with a lot of new labor demand, forcing employers to increase wages and encouraging substitution of capital for the least desirable jobs. Both the wage effect and the annuity itself would increase the share of national income available to those without direct claims on capital, reducing inequality. In his talk, Summers mused (wonderfully) that he’d prefer we not evolve to an economy in which people are employed providing increasingly marginal services to the rich, working as specialized “knee masseurs”? and the like. A straightforward way to preclude that is to ensure that everyone has the means to refuse those jobs and take chances on more meaningful and ultimately more valuable work.

The Hadza are organized into bands, called 'camps' in the literature, of typically 20–30 people, though camps of over a hundred may form during berry season. There is no tribal or other governing hierarchy, and conflict may be resolved by one of the parties voluntarily moving to another camp. The Hadza live in a communal setting and engage in cooperative child rearing, where many individuals (both related and unrelated) provide high quality care for children.[24]

The Hadza move camp for a number of reasons. Conflict is resolved primarily by leaving camp; camps frequently split for this reason. Camps are abandoned when someone falls ill and dies, as illness is associated with the place they fell ill. There is also seasonal migration between dry-season refuges, better hunting grounds while water is more abundant, and areas with large numbers of tubers or berry trees when they are in season. If a man kills a particularly large animal such as a giraffe far from home, a camp will temporarily relocate to the kill site (smaller animals are brought back to the camp). Shelters can be built in a few hours, and most of the possessions owned by an individual can be carried on their backs.

The Hadza are predominantly monogamous, though there is no social enforcement of monogamy.[5] While men and woman value traits such as hard work when evaluating for mates they also value physical attractiveness. In fact, many of their preferences for attractiveness, such as symmetry,[25] averageness[26] and sexually dimorphic voice pitch[27] are similar to preferences found in Western nations.

Because of a Harvard University study, the Hadza people have served as a model for the dawn of modern social networking, on how our ancestors may have formed ties with kin and non-kin based on shared attributes, contributing to the necessary evolution in cooperative processes needed for today's civilizations social groups to thrive.[28]

Lowe wrote: Good post, stone.  I tend to think that many people like having superiors, whether at work or elsewhere.  It makes things simple.