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Contemporary books for sparking personal and organizational transformation
Shepherd
As a journalist covering the Future of Work and Silicon Valley in the 2010s, I encountered pioneering social entrepreneurs and newly minted tech billionaires whose ideologies attracted millions and have since shaped our culture, economy, and society. I've curated some of the most impactful books that informed my understanding of their ambitions and how work is evolving, as well as the thought leaders who inspired them.
Is your organization—and leadership style—adaptive enough for this moment?
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 evolved beyond Holacracy
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”).
Why Amazon, Apple, and a Slew of Startups Are Fighting to Get Into This L.A. Neighborhood
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.)
Designing companies for human flourishing
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.”
Is Holacracy —or self-organization more broadly — the future of work?
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
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.”
Inside the fascinating Holacracy experiment at Zappos
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
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.