I'm curious and also pretty sure that if I ever started a company, I'd at least try to do it without any sort of formal management. At least to try.
I'm pretty sure almost every big contemporary tech company tries this when the big company is small and growing, but it almost never works. Joel Spolsky wrote it about the management problem here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FieldGuidetoDeveloper....
Actually, politics happen everywhere that more than two people congregate. It’s just natural. By “no politics” I really mean “no dysfunctional politics.”
Funnily enough, he uses an example from Microsoft—but the Microsoft of the early 1990s.
No formal management doesn't appear to scale above some number of employees / workers. I can't tell what that number is, but I would guess that it's somewhere around 125 – 150 people—that is, the Dunbar number.[1] Maybe it could be as high as 1,000, but I'm pretty damn skeptical it could be higher than 2,000.
I'm pretty sure almost every big contemporary tech company tries this when the big company is small and growing, but it almost never works. Joel Spolsky wrote it about the management problem here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FieldGuidetoDeveloper....
Actually, politics happen everywhere that more than two people congregate. It’s just natural. By “no politics” I really mean “no dysfunctional politics.”
Funnily enough, he uses an example from Microsoft—but the Microsoft of the early 1990s.
He also writes about it here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/07.html.
No formal management doesn't appear to scale above some number of employees / workers. I can't tell what that number is, but I would guess that it's somewhere around 125 – 150 people—that is, the Dunbar number.[1] Maybe it could be as high as 1,000, but I'm pretty damn skeptical it could be higher than 2,000.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number