Featured articles
Is your organization—and leadership style—adaptive enough for this moment?
April 8, 2020, The Ready
Over a breathtakingly fast timeline, the novel coronavirus is accelerating an evolutionary shift in how we work. Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sequoia labeled the coronavirus the Black Swan of 2020 and reminded founders and CEOs that “in some ways, business mirrors biology … those who survive ‘are not the strongest or the most intelligent, but the most adaptable to change.’”
Going remote is merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the deeper changes organizations are undergoing in order to survive (and even thrive) in this new environment. Physicians are seeking guidance from tech and cryptocurrency communities on how to establish effective peer-to-peer (P2P) networks so they can quickly share information. Annual budget projections everywhere are irrelevant. Predict-and-control measures that suffice in stable conditions no longer apply. Now firms must optimize for more decentralized decision making, speed, agility, and self-organization.
Zappos has quietly backed away from holacracy
January 29, 2020, Quartz
Six years ago, Amazon-owned Zappos began upending its traditional management structure. In lieu of a typical corporate structure, with power concentrated at the top, the online shoe retailer would adopt a decentralized system with “no job titles, no managers, no hierarchy.”
CEO Tony Hsieh was originally inspired by the idea of creating a city-like environment without central planning. “Every time a city doubles in size, productivity per resident goes up 15%,” he has said. He saw holacracy, a new kind of management structure predicated on decision-making authority being distributed throughout the organization, as the tool to access that kind of resilience and hyper-productivity. Zappos has since embraced a new framework to support this vision, called market-based dynamics (“MBD”).
Extinction Rebellion is using holacracy to scale its international movement
December 29, 2019, Quartz
While the XR movement has received its share of criticism as it has grown in size and power—namely around its lack of diversity—its sheer numbers and degree of international press coverage point to an enviable level of operational success.
A key to this success? Choosing an effective organizational model early on, informed by the latest management science. XR is a decentralized network designed to resemble a holacracy, an operating structure for self-organization tested by tech companies like Google, Zappos, and Medium. Anyone can join XR so long as they adhere to its 10 core principles and values, including a commitment to nonviolence.
Why Amazon, Apple, and a Slew of Startups Are Fighting to Get Into This L.A. Neighborhood
December 10, 2019, Marker
How sleepy Culver City became the next tech boomtown. This past year, VCs invested close to $1 billion in Culver City startups like gaming company Scopely and storage startup Clutter, whose marquee investors include Sequoia Capital and Softbank. (By comparison, the greater Los Angeles area, including Orange County, pulled in $12.6 billion in total.)
How can we design companies for human flourishing?
September 28, 2019, Quartz
Former McKinsey consultant Frederic Laloux was compelled to find answers to this question after a decade of exploring the interiors of some of the world’s most influential companies as a coach and advisor. He determined there must be a better way to design companies in the 21st century. So he left his job and began researching organizations that are operating at “the next stage of consciousness.” Laloux discovered a number of successful companies that fit this description, ranging in size from a few hundred to several thousand employees.
“This next stage involves taming our ego and searching for more authentic, more wholesome ways of being,” Laloux wrote. “If the past is any guide to the future, then as we grow into the next stage of consciousness, we will also develop a corresponding organizational model.”
Andrew Yang’s basic income plan permits Americans to fail. And that’s a good thing
August 20, 2019, Quartz
A UBI would free Americans to shift from scarcity to abundance mode, which would enable more people to take risks and engage in a greater, more expansive vision for their future. Yang’s freedom dividend would give Americans greater agency to leave codependent relationships, professional or otherwise, and operate as the CEO or entrepreneur of their own lives.
It’s a compelling idea, though not a new one; Martin Luther King, Jr. was a proponent of a guaranteed income in the 1960s. But it is building momentum again as we’re entering the fourth industrial revolution.
Is holacracy the future of work or a management cult?
October 9, 2018, Quartz
The philosophy behind holacracy—that power needs to be distributed throughout the network— makes intuitive sense, particularly in the age of emerging blockchain technology. Robertson, an early cryptocurrency investor and a libertarian, isn’t shy about his frustration with the US political system and his vision for holacracy’s potential to spread from business and eventually inform a new set of principles to govern states and territories.
Societal holacracy is clearly a vast leap, but as a new system of organizational design, it is winning fans. HolacracyOne counts a few hundred companies as clients and estimates that there are about 1,000 organizations around the world that have adopted its methods. Google, Ernst & Young, and Dubai governmental agency KHDA have all experimented with holacracy, with varying degrees of success.
What Mark Zuckerberg taught this VC about leadership
October 21, 2016, Quartz
Mike Vernal learned a lot by reporting directly to Mark Zuckerberg for nearly a decade at Facebook, including what traits separate CEOs like Zuckerberg from the rest.
“The best founders have what is called a ‘growth mindset’—where they really value learning and self improvement above all else,” Vernal explained from Chelsea Piers in New York, where Sequoia Capital, the venture firm he joined six months ago, was hosting an event to encourage college students to join startups. “They surround themselves with advisors who help them get that, surround themselves with team members who help them get that, and try to discipline themselves to learn new things, constantly acquiring new skills and getting better at the things that you need to get better at.”
A member of the PayPal mafia says hiring for culture fit is completely overrated
October 20, 2016, Quartz
“In other companies that I’ve built or seen, there’s the opposite. People are extremely well-liked across the teams—people loved each other as human beings—but they doubted the other person’s competence,” explained PayPal cofounder and Affirm CEO Max Levchin. “In the middle of when everything is on the line—and we’ll go back to loving each other, but right now, I just want you to not do your engineering job because you’re not even that good of an engineer, even though you’re the CTO—that’s the end of the company. That will not survive.”
The remarkable story of the Google engineer who died on Everest in pursuit of the Silicon Valley ideal
September 8, 2016, Quartz
Dan Fredinburg was head of privacy at Google X, the search giant’s “moonshots” division, and Everest was his own moonshot. He had narrowly evaded death on his first attempt to scale the mountain the year before, and had lobbied hard to win approval for a second expedition.
Holacracy at Zappos: It’s either the future of management or a social experiment gone awry
January 14, 2015, Quartz
CEO Tony Hsieh’s experiments with corporate organization make Zappos an important laboratory for confronting some of the plagues of large companies, including employee disenchantment and inability to take risks, move quickly, surface problems, and tap into the full staff’s best ideas. A wave of other companies, many of them tech startups, are similarly trying to reengineer management practices.
Why it’s more demanding to work for a company without a traditional hierarchy
February 13, 2014, Quartz
Working without a manager might sound like a dream but the reality is that it’s often much more demanding. As companies like Zappos and Medium adopt self-governing structures, flat management is piquing the interest of myriad organizations—though it’s not entirely new.