Breaking news in January: Zappos, the famous online shoe store, gets away from traditional management organization to embrace Holacracy, a new organizational model without middle managers! This experiment is noted in many press articles as an experimental transformation.
Holacracy is an organizational framework for organizations with a strong purpose and that can be described as working in loose project teams, with distributed authority. This new experiment will be very interesting to follow, as Zappos has already a very strong, decentralized company culture that might make this model successful in that particular context. Read (or at least consider) the (very long and comprehensive) constitution of holacracy!
What is extremely interesting is how many companies do experiment more and more with new organizational models that promote self-responsibility of the employees and encourage creativity. At the same time, these models get rid of the middle-class of intermediate management, or at least sort-of (in holacracy there are still some people more in charge than others apparently: ‘partners’, ‘lead links’, ‘core members’, but it is not linked to direct power and authority).
Let’s observe this experiment and learn further how the organizations will change in the Collaborative Age!
