I always scratch my head when stuff like this comes up. Not that it isn't a good idea or it doesn't have its place, but more that people think "traditional management" is a thing itself.
For instance, if I could summarize my 15 years of people and exec management it might be this: empathy and seek first to understand, then be understood (can't remember where I read this one). If I had to tack on something after this is it "take the hill", meaning a very clear shared vision so if there is ever ambiguity, people know what the ultimate goal is so they can make the right judgement call when needed (taken from the military, I believe).
My issue with things like this article is that they use different terms for the same things. It seems there will always need to be someone setting direction, someone following up that people are doing the right thing and some key decision makers. What we call those people might be different and how you "organize" could look different on paper, but those roles kinda, sorta need to exist.
Now, the feel and philosophy of the whole company can be different, but I would say that is more about the culture and how people react to good and bad news.
So things like Valve and Medium try to say they are not "traditional companies". Well, no company ever is, really. It's like when every company under the sun says they "only hire A people". They don't. They say they do and they want to, but they don't. Otherwise no B or C people would ever make their way through these companies and we all know they do. Heck, there are C, D and F people leading venture funded companies in SF right now.
So, in closing to this rambling comment, terms don't matter. Systems of management aren't important. Focus on the people, the mission and understanding both and you'll be fine.
I disagree. Systems of management are important. There are going to be some people who work well under a strongly hierarchical system, some people who work well under a flat system, and people who could hack it under either. Thing is, there is no reason to believe that the people you attract under any given culture/structure is completely independent of ability to provide a product or service.
For example, GE is a very hierarchical megacorporation, BUT it has found it expedient to make its aircraft parts manufacturing flat, because parts don't need to be turned out so quickly and individual workers can have multiple specializations.
The intriguing thing about the article for me is that it combines a pretty sophisticated description of an alternative management structure with a characterization of "traditional management" techniques which is just daft. There's nothing remotely novel or "flat" about a corporate culture where managers and their reports are happy to discuss their personal lives and socialize with each other; it's pretty standard in lots of very hierachical, old-fashioned corporations whose managers have an above-subnormal level of social skill.
And for that matter, asking employees to rank their "SCARF" priorities sounds like some new form of torture a pointy-haired middle-manager might devise to torment you with the unforeseen consequences of picking the "wrong" order ("in view of your desire for greater autonomy and ambivalence about 'certainty', you're now part time")
Yes, yes, and yes. I work with Holacracy and I will confirm that the techniques described from Stirman's experience before joining Medium (chatting with employees, SCARF, etc.) are not to be put in the same bag as Holacracy.
It doesn't even make that much sense to compare them -- these techniques are bolt-ons - more or less useful practices to make do with the challenges inherent to a conventional structure. On the contrary, Holacracy is a new meta-structure for how power is distributed, how decision-making is distributed, with different channels available to effect changes - a new "social operating system", really.
In my experience, having my manager use techniques like SCARF to "better reward me" is nowhere near as powerful and empowering as having no manager to solve my problems, because there is a system that allows me to address them myself.
As a species, humanity is about 50,000 years old. Millions, if you include our most obvious ancestral species.
The claim that neologism-of-choice is a "new" system is extremely unlikely to be true. What is more likely is that the new system is a reinvention of a system that has been seen hundreds of times under hundreds of names. Social structures tend to be evolutionarily convergent, depending on prevailing constraints. If a given structure is rare, that is because it relies or can only exist in a peculiar environment (eg Valve + massive profitability).
Truly. There is nothing new under the sun. Including totally "new" social systems that "work" because of short-term enthusiasm.
Well, technically, I'll grant you that it's impossible to rule out. IMO it's highly unlikely that someone came up with these rules: http://holacracy.org/constitution, but I'm not going to argue that, the novelty is not my main point.
I'm interested in whether it's working. From what I've seen, it is. Perfect? Of course not. The be all and end all of running a business? No, you still need to do work. But it's a much better framework to do so that anything else I've seen. Many people seem to share this opinion, too, and it seems to help them to their work better (and enjoy it more). That's pretty cool in my book, I don't need to convince the world that it's right for everybody. If you find the same benefits with another system, or a similar one from thousands years ago, who cares, run with it.
hah, totally agree about the SCARF thing. I thought, "oh that's a great idea", and then I immediately realized, "oh hell no". This may sound creepy, but I guess part of a good manager is figuring out the SCARF parameters of an employee and figuring out how to arrange them in projects/gently nudge them in the right direction based on what you (hopefully have correctly) identified as the motivators for the employee.
Would you agree with 'which system of management you pick isn't that important'? I think point is that management system isn't necessaraly unneeded, but that it's less important for progress than the acts of having empathy for someone, and they you.
Every team will always have different people. Some need more hierarchy, some need more autonomy. Some differ on SCARF. Some differ on Myers-Briggs personality type. Sometimes the differences are big. Usually they are small and not binary. The job of a manager is to create an environment, where all those different people can efficiently work together. This means every manager will to some extend create their own system in their sphere of influence.
> So things like Valve and Medium try to say they are not "traditional companies"
In Valve's case, it's true. They are so unstoppably profitable that the company can be run in just about any fashion at all. The profitability is now largely due to network effects.
Any system from totalitarian dictatorship through to hippie commune will work, so long as it doesn't decide to dry up the river of money.
Normal businesses have much tighter constraints, tougher competition and far less free cashflow to play with.
Drawing universal conclusions about populations from extreme outliers is generally considered to be a mistake.
> empathy and seek first to understand, then be understood (can't remember where I read this one)
Could be from Stephen Covey (habit nr. 5) as one other mentioned. It could also be in the Prayer of Francis of Assisi,
[...]
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive.
or in How to Win Friends and Influence People from Dale Carnegie with principles like:
Become genuinely interested in other people.
Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.
Talk in terms of the other person's interest.
Make the other person feel important – and do it sincerely.
I hate this article. It's not bad in any factual way, so it's an opinion...but the hero worship is just intense.
That, and it just reminds me of the hustle startups do all the time. "We're rebuilding the internet." Come on...
Regarding the actual management content of the article: it seems too good to be true. From what I can understand of the article's explanation of "link leads" and "evolving roles" - it essentially reduces job description to a generalist, jack of all trades perspective.
That's not realistic. Once you pass that beatific startup culture point, you need structure. Structure isn't a bad thing. It's faulty managers who give it a bad rap, but from a group dynamics and sociological perspective, implementing structure in a company makes sense at scale and for maintaining/improving productivity.
Unfortunately, it's trendy to be anti-all-things-BigCo nowadays. "We need an idea for how to run our company!"..."Well, what's Microsoft doing?...Aha! We'll do NOT-THAT!"...
Personally, if it works it works, but I think I'd hate it, and I'm skeptical.
I don't know. Every action you take "changes the world" even in an incredibly insignificant way. That's a much lower bar than "rebuild the internet". You say that and I'm like "O rly? So does your new internet use IPv6?"
Having been there before, once they get to 70 or so people it all starts to falls apart. Once the founders no longer personally know all the people then structure comes in. By 200 people if you have no structure you are out of business. Also once you have lots of legal issues or are required to follow standard accounting practices or other picky stuff like that this nice holocracy will crater.
Dunbar's number. I frequently quote 150 people as the breaking point, though it's a little less precise, and depends on the strength of the leader and organization.
I should think a Dunbar-compatible company size would be well under 150 – Dunbar's number suggests the total number of people an individual can relate to at any point, so unless most of the employees have no relationships outside the office, I'd start at under half that.
Incidentally, that would put the number around the 70 quoted in the grandparent comment.
Good point. CEOs tend to be good relators, so that biases the number up. They have to relate to a lot of externals, which would push the # down.
My guess is salespeople would utilize most of their attention externally. Perhaps junior engineers internally? (This could also explain why it's economical for companies to pay for dinner and sponsor happy hours)
That 150 limit also involves your ability to keep track of people's relationships to eachother I think. Which would mean that you should be able to maintain relationships with significantly more people if they're divided into mostly-disjoint groups.
Exactly - organizational hierarchy. :-) This is where the "There are no managers" can break down.
Another area that organizations struggle with is spending the time to put the structure in. They may say, "It takes more effort to put in structure, so while we want to be structured, let's just work harder as we go from 150 to 250, we'll solve it later when we're less busy" Then it goes from 250 to 400, then the next thing you know it's a 1600 person mess. :-)
What if you break the company in two companies (or more) ? The problem may be trying to keep a flat looking small pyramid look small, when it is in fact starting to show its real face.
I don't know if it's even possible, but why not push a small group to become owners of their own shop, outsourcing work to them ? This might push those small groups to seek other connections to the external world and thus build strength and resiliency.
Of course this implies giving up the money. This is probably where the core tension lies. I guess many wouldn't even want to think about it.
This is the idea for divisional structures. P&G does this by letting their brands fight it out for resources, creating the spirit of independent companies. It worked out for a while, but eventually they found the right structure was by product category. (Soap the category versus Tide the brand)
Semco (quoted elsewhere) was big on the "fund your best people's ideas" concept to cut loose companies. When you have to get external funding too, it forces discipline. The kerietsu (sp?) concept breaks down during tough times when partial owners subsidize the weaker units in the group. This happened in Japan.
This isn't a simple problem, because there's no one size fits all solution.
There is structure, and there are explicit rules for how that structure is modified. There are rules that require decision making to be documented rather than held in your brain. Accountability is explicit. The entire system is designed to be scalable by a process that allows individual roles to transition to teams (or back) with as much nesting is required for the business at hand. On the whole the design is aggressive about making things explicit and systematized.
Whether it works or not I don't know, but it's clearly not the kind of free for all you're assuming.
there are some pretty dramatic counterexamples to your claim.
Valve, of course is the most well-known, but Semco is a large brazilian company that runs this way, as is Morning Star, a tomato processing company in California.
A browse through Morning Star's website reveals job listings for defined roles. They're looking for (i) people with "a strong business background" and "an aspiration for senior leadership" to manage their finances, (ii) people who "likely have a meaningful formal education in related disciplines" to "coordinate", "train" and "identify proper operating procedures", and (iii) "hands on professionals" who need the "ability to read, write, and comprehend instructions" in addition to specific practical skills.
Sure, they might downplay rank and authority, but it doesn't sound like an organization without structure or de facto managerial roles.
fair point. I think corporations live on a spectrum of authoritarianism, and these are "far out in the distribution" but they aren't perfect, and I don't think in reality a perfectly flat corporation can exist because all employees have a natural range of skillsets. But by "dramatic" I meant dramatic relative to the parent post's claim about organizational size relative to success of the model.
The Semco story is fascinating. I wish I knew some folks that worked there. The wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler) doesn't tell much but from what I remember of the book, they cut organizations free when they reach a certain size.
I used to work for Viant, a digital consultancy where they kept every office to about 100 (or was it 150?) employees. If they had to hire more employees, they'd spin off a new office. This was based on Dunbar's number (referenced elsewhere in this thread).
GitHub does just fine in a non-hierarchical setup even with pesky accounting controls in place. :) We're going to top 200 very soon (as in within a few weeks), and while we've had to make minor adjustments here and there, by and large we're still the same structure that Tom, Chris, PJ, and Scott setup at the start.
"He read all the ‘right’ books on management and took the advice to heart: don’t get too chummy, shield your team from anything they don’t need to know, ask them to identify roadblocks to progress, reward them all equally."
These are definitely NOT the right books on management. Every single one of those things is the exact opposite of what good managers do. That sounds like the advice from the world's most fear-ridden, counter-productive HR organization. Good managers care about their teams as people, communicate openly, and overwhelmingly reward their best.
The approach works great for small, nimble organizations, but it doesn't scale. For instance, I talked with a tech company a few weeks ago that's rounding 50 employees and is now a few years old, and the employees are all frustrated that they've never gotten performance reviews. Founders hate performance reviews, because they're against the DNA of most entrepreneurs. But a lot of the people who become developers, customer support reps, and marketers really like when someone gives them a clear idea of what they're doing well, what they need to work on, and a clear plan for how they can develop.
One of the challenging parts of management is that it's really hard, it's highly situational, and it's non-deterministic. Having really great processes helps, but at the end of the day you really just need to hire people who are good at managing and set the right priorities for them as an organization. Inventing weird systems like this sounds great, but in most cases it doesn't scale. For instance, a role-centric organization will work until you realize that you need 60 people involved to get a press release out because someone declared themselves the Word Master and needs to have a say in punctuation.
But outside the weird jargon, this isn't a new kind of company, it's just good management principles. Have clear accountability; be candid; care about your people; connect everyone to a broader vision. It sounds like common sense sometimes, but when you go to implement it in the tactical reality of the day to day, it's really hard.
I hate all of these pretentious claims about new ways of working when they all do exactly the same thing:
1) Set up a straw man in the form of "traditional management", whilst there are hundreds of forms of management and managers, most of which don't "look at reports as resources", or even look at people as "reports". As a manager, I find this insulting.
2) These shiny new methods are the way many small companies have worked for fucking decades. They just weren't so fucking pretentious about it.
It's the same shit as with shiny new technology, frameworks and methods in our business: everyone thinks they've invented the wheel, and nobody bothers to look around them (and especially behind them) to see if the same thing hasn't been done countless times before.
Excuse the language, but this attitude is just pathetic. Nothing new is being invented here.
I have to say I agree with your point 1) in general.
But not with 2). Holacracy is not just a set of vague principles that you swear to apply as best as you can, or some bolt-on process to add to your box. It's a completely different way of governing a company, a different power structure, and its rules are specific and spelled out: http://holacracy.org/constitution
Whether it works or not is another question, but at least it's different. Then, sure, it's not a silver bullet: http://youtu.be/gltN3NuY5dc
> • Autonomy-oriented employees may need the ability to work from home, or simply slip on their head phones to tune everyone else out.
It's 2013. Are these really special perks to make a certain kind of person happy? Maybe I'm weird, but to me a company that doesn't allow me to tune out with headphones one or occasionally work elsewhere is like a company that tells me what to wear or tracks office presence hours. Do these, in our field, even exist anymore? (barring Yahoo)
For "Autonomy", I'd rather expect something like having a very large say over what an employee is working on and how she does it.
> Do these, in our field, even exist anymore? (barring Yahoo)
Company dress codes and time tracking? They are pretty common outside of the startup culture. "No shorts and a collared shirt, please track your billable hours".
Really? (I'm assuming you mean to include "in the US"). I'm starting to understand the appeal of Valley startups.
There is no software-heavy company that I know of in the Netherlands that does this.
Sure, it's common that companies ask you to keep track of how many hours you worked on which project, but clocking in and out of the office? I've never seen it.
Much of it depends on the background of a company. If you are writing software for a large financial institution, chances are the HR department will ask you to wear business casual (or worse). In my experience in the east, middle-sized companies can go either way--some mandate business casual, others don't care. Again, in my experience, this is often related to whether clients are often visiting the offices.
My current employer, with its tech leadership drawn from the Valley, has been incredibly flexible about most things. But we were recently acquired by a more established, traditional company based on the east coast. There are rumors that I'll have to start wearing something other than shorts and t-shirts at the office, but nothing has been handed down yet.
Holacracy is an instance of organizational democracy, but it's not new - I took a holacracy seminar 6 years ago. Kudos to Medium for using the framework though - it's one of the few that lays out, soup to nuts, how to run a democratic company.
There are many companies that operate using democracy as an organizing principle - Semco is the great-granddaddy of them all (two books - Maverick[1] and the 7 Day Weekend[2] - were written by Semco's founder, Ricardo Semler, about how Semco operates).
Other well-known democratically-run companies include Zappos, WL Gore, DaVita (a $12B company), and Dreamhost.
If you're interested, take a look at WorldBlu[3] for more - they've been building a community of these kinds of companies, have tons of resources on their site, and even have a conference on organizational democracy.
I'm an anarchist at heart so I love these types of stories but I'm also very pragmatic. I work for a very large multi-national concern and I know that eventually you're going to get employees who are more concerned with things at home than their job.
For these people the job is just a meal ticket, something to feed their kids and put a roof over their heads. When the passion goes out of frame like that, what's left is apathy.
No "operating system" in the world has a cure for that.
Personally I know I would thrive in a management-free environment, if anything has been positive in my reviews it has been that I am self managing and do not need any guidance to find things to do. But people around me do their best to avoid hard work all day long. They have what we in Sweden call "tillsvidareanställning" and that means it's practically impossible to fire them.
Seems to me that Holacracy is great if you manage to find driven employees who care about your business. I'm not saying they should dedicate their lives to it but they should feel pride in what they do and a sense of responsibility for their company.
So far I've only seen this in small startups, and even then it wasn't prominent.
I do not even believe Valve is immune to this, despite the hoopla.
I've worked on games on my own. I know that there are a 1000 different parts of a game that you simply do not want to touch. The tedious bugs and polish, that every video game has to have. The endless hours of play testing.
Even working for myself, where I have total stake in the product, I have to force things.
Startups are a special breed of crazy. Initially they emulate a dorm-like environment, where you go and hang out with your friends and make "killer" this-or-that. But in the end, it's just a sham. The founders are there to make money. And in Silicon Valley terms, that means urgent breakneck growth. No startup culture survives the onboarding of an HR department and the associated growing pains.
"For these people the job is just a meal ticket, something to feed their kids and put a roof over their heads. When the passion goes out of frame like that, what's left is apathy."
The implied assumptions, such as the above, are more than a little suspect, sending the resulting calculations based on them off the rails.
"To help with this, instead of a focus on employees, there’s a focus on roles. Each circle has a ‘Lead Link’ who determines what roles the circle needs and how they get assigned. In fact, one person can hold multiple roles if their bandwidth and expertise allows. Stirman is both the People Operations lead and Word Master (which comes with final say on punctuation and capitalization, among other word-based dilemmas)."
Isn't this another way of saying he's manager of People Operations and Words? Perhaps there is no more formal career ownership, but it still sounds like he's a manager, no?
Yes, it's exactly what it means. He's the "manager" of his roles, and within the authority granted to this roles, he can make autocratic decisions that others can't veto (not even the "Lead Link"). And it's true for every employee in every role: they have full authority to exercise their role's authority.
Of course you need a way to modify the roles' definitions; there is a governance process for that, at each team level, and any team member can propose modifying the roles, not only the "Lead Link" (contrary to what this quote mistakenly suggests). I hope this clarifies a bit.
I went into this article thinking it'd be a puff piece, but the details about holacracy are very well done and a lot of the insights are more or less actionable even if you're at a more traditionally-organized company.
Something that doesn't get talked about too much is how popular holocratic structures are in non-profits, either formally or informally.
In my experience, there are less non-profits formally working with Holacracy mostly because they can't afford hiring the consultants to help them adopt it. And it's not easy to adopt on your own - it goes against a lot of oft-entrenched habits. That said I know that many have tried, though I don't know how it's going because I'm not even indirectly involved.
Interestingly, the distinction between for- and non-profit is less relevant with Holacracy. The bottom line is effectively the (explicit, written-down) purpose of the organization. More on that here: http://holacracy.org/blog/for-profit-non-profit-for-purpose
I just want to know who the guy that can make the decision to fire you is at places like Github, Valve, and Medium. Either that person doesn't exist or that person is your manager.
I think the proceedings are open and transparent and the employee whose employment is in question would be a part of them. They could start with a group meeting where a discussion takes place about team members' misgivings about the performance or contribution of said employee, with a chance for him/her to respond. After a couple of rounds, if the concerns are not addressed then a decision is made to let them go.
Without wishing to seem unnecessarily combative, you are being naive. Nothing about a meeting being open prevents the possibility that its outcome has been fixed.
All this "no hierarchy" and "no management" movement seems really nice. What I want to see, Valve included, is how they keep it when there is no money.
So far Valve is doing pretty good and still sometimes there are some talk about silos and how it does not work for everyone.
I don't know much about Medium finances but I would love to see stories about these management strategies in companies that are actually trying to earn some money and don't have pockets full of cash just waiting to be spent.
I'm curious to hear how well it scales, and also what the downsides are once they come out. A lack of praise for employees seems like a fairly minor issue.
It's been said Valve is somewhat like high school with their completely flat hierarchy, although this is never mentioned in the many articles praising their management structure (or lack thereof). I'm curious if this type of management system causes similar problems.
That being said, everyone is different and some people (and cultures - Germany, Switzerland) function in a hierarchy very well, while others don't. I think the article alludes a little to this with the comment about individuals who take initiative vs those who don't. IMHO, those individuals who take initiative on their own are drawn to entrepreneurship and small companies, whereas those who don't are drawn to large corporations where others can set goals for them and as they achieve those goals, they move up. As Medium grows, they're inevitably going to attract more of the latter type, and it will be harder to provide meaningful roles for the former type.
Based on what I read about Valve, it is not surprising that they have a lot of politics going on. That's the issue with flat structures - when authorities and accountabilities are unclear, you need make alliances (seen as "cliques" from the exterior) to get your projects moving forward.
On the contrary, Holacracy has processes that push for clarity. It distinguishes people and their roles, and provides forums (e.g., clear meeting processes) to address misalignments and conflicts between roles, in service of the company's purpose. It's well explained in this 3-min video http://youtu.be/9U_XDin5tjI
Disclosure; I work with HolacracyOne. Hope that clarifies the difference a bit
No, the processes themselves are not explained in this video. This other one explains "tactical meetings": http://youtu.be/8NrsVBATZCM
That said if you want the technicalities of the process, you'll find everything in the constitution (not as entertaining, but more accurate): http://holacracy.org/constitution
So glad that someone's bold enough to challenge the traditional management system and experiment with a new kind. Having worked at a mega-sized corporation, I definitely felt like there was a serious need to revamp/rethink the current command and control system. Most employees feel disconnected from the decisions made by the management and the managers have hard time earning the buy-ins from their employees. I actually entertained the thought about building a thriving company without central management, with every employee empowered to make their own decisions (also take the responsibilities for them as well). I asked that question to the founder of Hoovers.com at a guest lecture. His answer was, based on his experience, pretty strong no. Most successful companies of our current time are represented by strong leaders, take Apple with Steve Jobs. But Apple will not stay Apple after Steve Jobs. A great company cannot last after the strong leader/founder leaves the company. Can we create a sustainable success with great PEOPLE instead of a single leader? I think Holacracy seems to be a promising solution and I would like to see this system stands the test of time.
I believe you could write an article with more bs in it. It would be difficult, but it would be possible.
This paints a strawman of the most dysfunctional traditional structure imaginable where no one knows who has what authority, no one knows what various managers do, individuals have no power, no one listens to the people "at the bottom" and managers are impersonal jerks whose job it is to keep their team in an isolation room.
Maybe Holacracy is the greatest system known to man. It looks like a surefire way to create ultra-political environments, endless meetings on topics unrelated to getting real work done (like restructuring the org and electing people) and eventually a centralized power base around a small political class.
But surely the narrative that Ev Williams didn't like managing, so he decided to get rid of all manager and dump the entire traditional structure because his last company was poorly managed isn't the best way to sell it.
Too often I see this piece of advice be overlooked or ignored, to the detriment of the entire department or organization:
“You want to make sure you hire only people you wouldn’t mind getting stuck in an airport with,” he says. “So many people fall into this trap of hiring highly skilled people who are bad culture fits. And I’d argue that’s the worst kind of hire – even worse than a poorly skilled person. If they’re as skilled as you think they are, they’ll gain power, influence and get more deeply enrooted in your technology, process and product. Then, when the honeymoon of your justifications is over and reality sets in, you’re seriously stuck with this person.”
If you want to hear more about Holacracy, there is a webinar this afternoon at 1:30 PST: http://holacracy.org/events/intro-to-holacracy-free-webinar-... - Disclaimer: I work with HolacracyOne, the company behind the model. I'd love to address several comments I see on this thread (and will later), but I'd recommend the webinar for anyone genuinely interested in a comprehensive understanding. It's hard to discuss a 'part' in any depth without understanding the whole.
I'd say the largest at this time would be Agencies of Change, 200+ employees (though it was a few years ago, I don't know now). We're currently working with one significantly bigger client, but we let them announce it first.
This sounds almost exactly like how traditional management is done at my job. Each "circle" has a lead "point" who distributes roles, but each person is able to make decisions about their particular part.
In what sense is this new? No-management companies have been around for hundreds of years, and we talk about how Steam has been doing this for ten years on a fairly regular basis.
How is a flat company more efficient than a company that doesn't hire shit managers?
Every article on the matter seems to be written by personalities that have an opinion that management hierarchies can NEVER innovate.
I've found the exact opposite to be true. Great leadership pushes everyone to be better. 2 strong personalities can lead to disaster if nobody is allowed to reign them in.
Yes. The interesting thing here is that without formal managers, you get informal managers, and the process for the selection of informal managers is likely to work in a similar way to the one in which people get popular at school.
Based on my experiences with their product, I think some top-down direction is precisely what they could use. Just because so many managers and/or management paradigms are inept does not mean that we should throw the baby out with the bath water.
Maybe if Medium spent their time distinguishing their product instead of their corporation I would know who they are. But I don't, and I'm not sure why they think I should, considering they are a blogging platform.
For instance, if I could summarize my 15 years of people and exec management it might be this: empathy and seek first to understand, then be understood (can't remember where I read this one). If I had to tack on something after this is it "take the hill", meaning a very clear shared vision so if there is ever ambiguity, people know what the ultimate goal is so they can make the right judgement call when needed (taken from the military, I believe).
My issue with things like this article is that they use different terms for the same things. It seems there will always need to be someone setting direction, someone following up that people are doing the right thing and some key decision makers. What we call those people might be different and how you "organize" could look different on paper, but those roles kinda, sorta need to exist.
Now, the feel and philosophy of the whole company can be different, but I would say that is more about the culture and how people react to good and bad news.
So things like Valve and Medium try to say they are not "traditional companies". Well, no company ever is, really. It's like when every company under the sun says they "only hire A people". They don't. They say they do and they want to, but they don't. Otherwise no B or C people would ever make their way through these companies and we all know they do. Heck, there are C, D and F people leading venture funded companies in SF right now.
So, in closing to this rambling comment, terms don't matter. Systems of management aren't important. Focus on the people, the mission and understanding both and you'll be fine.