A New Order of Things
Niccolo Machiavelli | Making the Case For Hierarchy | Factoids | Elsewhere
There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things.
| Niccolo Machiavelli
I confess, in these days, I am thinking more about ‘more dangerous’ rather than possible upsides of a near-term new order of things. In the longer run, though, everything is on the table.
Making The Case for Hierarchy
I read an article by Nicolai Foss and Peter Klein, Rethinking Hierarchy, in which the authors argue that hierarchy is still needed, if only to manage large projects or organizations, but needs to be reconsidered in light of the need for greater autonomy in knowledge-based work.
They make a distinction between Mark 1 and 2 authority:
Authority has many faces: It may mean the right to hire, fire, instruct, supervise, intervene, and sanction [Mark 1 or management]. But the exercise of managerial authority is also associated with other behaviors: leading, creating structures and processes, forging consensus, aligning behavior around shared goals, and fostering change [Mark 2 or leadership].
If they want to make a distinction between managing and leading, why the Mark 1 and 2 lingo? Couldn’t they just say managing and leading?
The transition to Mark 2 [management-centered] organizations is tricky, especially when the organization is 'delayered'. The discussion becomes a bit sketchy in the middle where a great deal of managerial intuition is invoked. Seems like this is a response to then recent bosslessness controversy, as examined by many:
Ethan Bernstein (and other contributors) asked us to move Beyond the Holacracy Hype. Most observers who have written about holacracy and other forms of self-management take extreme positions, either celebrating these “bossless,” “flat” work environments for fostering flexibility and engagement or denouncing them as naive experiments that ignore how things really get done. To gain a more accurate, balanced perspective, the authors—drawing on examples from +Zappos, Morning Star, and other companies—examine why these structures have evolved and how they operate, both in the trenches and at the level of enterprise strategy and policy.
Self-organization models typically share three characteristics:
Teams are the structure. Within them, individual “roles” are collectively defined and assigned to accomplish the work.
Teams design and govern themselves, while nested within a larger structure.
Leadership is contextual. It’s distributed among roles, not individuals, and responsibilities shift according to fit and as the work changes.
Adopting self-management wholesale—using it to determine what should be done, who should do it, and how people will be rewarded across an entire enterprise—is hard, uncertain work, and the authors argue that in many environments it won’t pay off. But their research and experience also suggest that elements of self-organization can be valuable tools for companies of all kinds, and they look at circumstances where it makes more sense to blend the new approaches with traditional models.
At the heart of the controversy is this self-governing aspect of bossless, flat organizations, which Geoff Marlow takes aim at in The unhelpful concept of "Flat Organisations” as presented by Joost Minaar in Flat Organizations: Companies Do NOT Need Middle Managers:
What they have done, which the article doesn’t make at all clear, is escaped the trap of conflating “hierarchy” with “decision making”.
The innovation, agility, and adaptiveness muscles that organisations need if they’re to thrive in an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world won’t develop in an organisation dominated by traditional hierarchically bureaucratic, top-down command and control thinking.
But in practice “flat” organisations don’t actually eliminate hierarchy, because in all human communities, hierarchies emerge in one form or another…
This phenomenon was recognised more than 50 years ago by feminist, political scientist, writer, and lawyer Jo Freeman.
In her seminal paper “The Tyranny of Structurelessness”, Freeman describes how the early women’s liberation movement genuinely tried to be “flat” — completely avoiding hierarchical structures, which they regarded as patriarchal.
Unfortunately, whilst this lack of hierarchical structure encouraged participation and personal insights, it also made it hard to get things done.
However, Freeman saw an altogether more sinister effect — eliminating hierarchy provided “a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others”.
Freeman describes how “This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of structurelessness does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones”.
She concludes that “As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules. Those who do not know the rules and are not chosen for initiation must remain in confusion or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of which they are not quite aware.”
In other words, hierarchies always emerge in organisations, even in organisations that try to be so “flat” that they explicitly eschew any structure.
Since some form of hierarchy always emerges, even when deliberately discouraged, the question is not should we embrace or eliminate hierarchy?
The question is what kind of hierarchy should we embrace?
As Bernstein points out, flatter organizations — like those created by Holocracy and other sociocratic organizations — don’t necessarily conceal authority, but they associate it with defined roles, rather than positions in a hierarchical order. Bossless does not mean a formless blob where tyranny inexorably arises, but on the other hand it doesn’t resolve all issues of individuals seeking to accrue power for their own ends, either. And of course, even in the most enlightened emergent organizations, leading and management are hard work, even when distributed more equitably among the governed.
I say ‘governed’ since corporations are organized generally as ‘private governments’, as Elizabeth Anderson has made clear.
Returning to Foss and Klein, they actually seem to be endorsing heterarchy, not pressing for hierarchy in all spheres, suggesting a great deal of self-management in smaller-scale parts of organizations:
Delegation is not simply a matter of empowering workers to do their best. Companies like Spotify and Valve, where software projects are mostly independent efforts with little need for coordination between them, can leave team size and composition, project requirements, and even some budgets up to the teams. Bottom-up organization — not literally bossless but flat, flexible, and organic — makes sense for these companies. But it might not make sense for a large manufacturing company that has a portfolio of highly interdependent products featuring shared designs and components and that sells bundles of complementary products. For such a company, more centralized control is needed. In deciding what, when, and how to delegate, managers can begin by asking a few simple questions to determine what will work best in their organization.
They end on a high note:
The need for hierarchy isn’t going away, but the form it takes is changing: deciding how things will be done rather than telling people what to do, and designing and enforcing the rules of the game rather than making everyone play it in a certain way. As Haier Group founder and CEO Zhang Ruimin put it, “Leaders of other enterprises often define themselves as captains of the ship, but I think I’m more the ship’s architect or designer. That’s different from a captain’s role, in which the route is often fixed and the destination defined.”
In redesigning managerial authority and hierarchy for the 21st century, leaders must realize that they don’t need to know everything, but only just enough, and they need to consider what their employees want and think is fair in designing structures and systems.
If you restate the last line, the result would sound more like emergent management to me, rather than hierarchy.
‘In redesigning authority and organization for the 21st century, we must realize that don’t don’t need to know everything when making decisions and delegating work, but only just enough, and we need to consider what the entire workforce wants and thinks is fair in designing structures and systems.’
Factoids
A change is gonna come.
A survey conducted in 2021 found that 66 percent thought America’s economic system needed to be completely reformed or needed major changes, while 85 percent said the same about its political system.
…
People bailing on MSNBC, or news in general?
In the week following Election Day, MSNBC averaged 500,000 viewers a day, a decline of 39 percent compared with average viewership in October. On Nov. 11, “The Rachel Maddow Show” had roughly half the viewers, on average, than it had a month earlier.
…
How much?
The average price of a hotel room in New York City in September climbed to $417, the highest monthly rate ever recorded in the city by CoStar, a real estate analytics company, since it started tracking the data in 1987.
An age of extremes.
…
Is a slurpee actually food?
7-Eleven these days commands nearly 2% of grocery sales in the U.S.—more than Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods, according to industry tracker Numerator.
| 7-Eleven, the Slurpee and a $47 Billion Takeover Battle
Actually, 7-Eleven sells a greaat deal of fresh food, so the ‘slurpee’ in the title is just a wisecrack.
Elsewhere
In The Last Call of the Corporate Peacock🦚, Andy Spence gets right to the point in this February post:
What is behind the 5-day Return-To-Office (RTO) mandate by larger employers?
There is no evidence that RTO leads to long-term productivity improvements.
He cites Nick Bloom for the claim:
Stanford Professor Nick Bloom argues that when a firm announces a 5-day RTO mandate it signals trouble ahead. He goes as far as stating that investors should sell their stock, and workers should update their CV/resumes.
He advances an argument -- which I buy into -- that corporate leaders are demanding a return to the office for egoistic reasons, not sensible business reasoning:
The concept of Corporate Peacocking - like male peacocks displaying vibrant plumage to attract mates, managers can showcase their status and contributions better when working onsite. Activities like swishing their feathers at all-hands company meetings or buying post-work drinks.
By bringing workers back to the office, managers can better signal their dominance in the corporate pecking order.
He makes a case that declining commercial office space utilization is a proof for the superfluity of the pre-pandemic office regime: sensible management is cutting back on nonessential expenses, and -- by the way -- the human costs of commuting. And, therefore, peacocks will adapt, albeit slowly:
We will still look for ways to signal our status - but more in the digital realm than strutting our feathers in the office.
…
Mercer on People Skills.
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