Fundamentals of Management, 11/e

Who Needs a Boss? Topic: Holacracy

“Holacracy.”44 That’s the word of the day at Zappos, the Nevada-based online shoe and apparel retailer. During a four-hour, year-end employee meeting some five years ago, CEO Tony Hsieh announced that he was eliminating the company’s traditional managerial and structural hierarchy to implement a holacracy. What is a holacracy, you ask? In a nutshell, it’s an organizational system with no job titles, no managers, and no top-down hierarchy with upper, middle, or lower levels where decisions can get hung up. The idea behind this new type of arrangement is to focus on the work that needs to be done and not on some hierarchical structure where great ideas and suggestions can get lost in the channels of reporting. ...