Zappos offers to pay employees to quit if they reject Holacracy (major Colin alert)

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The story (or intro) is actually very short but the internal email (in post #2) begins "This is a long email. Please take 30 minutes to read through the email in its entirety." I know many of you would rather take your chances lying on a train track for 30 minutes but I think the insight into the internal dynamics is fascinating. (And nobody is forcing you to read or have entered this thread.)

The mushroom next to the tree metaphor strikes me as the biggest load of bullshit since trickle-down economics.

Internal Memo: Zappos is offering severance to employees who aren’t all in with Holacracy
By Aimee Groth
March 26, 2015

Zappos, the online shoe retailer owned by Amazon, is in the process of adopting a new management structure called Holacracy, a tool designed for companies to become self-organizing. Since the rollout began in 2013, it’s been a bumpy ride for the Las Vegas-based company’s 1,400-some employees. Quartz reported earlier this year that the shift has led to some employee departures and questions over whether Holacracy is more about PR and branding for Zappos than systemic organizational change. Alexis Gonzales-Black, the Zappos recruiter tasked with co-leading the transition, left the company (citing personal reasons) in advance of the memo.

Since Zappos moved its corporate campus to downtown Las Vegas in 2013, a number of employees have become frustrated with the number of new initiatives led by a CEO with a bent toward experimentation. The company is currently testing an “Open Market” system within its call center, allowing customer service representatives to set their own hours, leading some to take advantage of the new framework. A Zappos employee, who asked not to be named, told Quartz that there’s a lot of uncertainty around how compensation will be determined under a system where employees fill multiple roles instead of holding job titles.


In his memo, Hsieh detailed the theory behind self-organization and asked employees for input on how to increase performance in a company without traditional managers. Hsieh says he’s now taking a “rip the bandaid” approach, and that the company will “begin the process of breaking down our legacy silo’ed structure/circles of merchandising, finance, tech, marketing, and other functions and create self-organizing and self-managing business-centric circles instead by starting to fund this new model.” Managers who are in good standing will receive their salaries until the end of 2015 but must find other roles: “To be clear, managers were absolutely necessary and valuable to the growth of Zappos over the years under our previous structure.”

The entire memo is reprinted below.
 
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Re: Zappos offers to pay employees to quit if they reject Holacracy (major Colin ale

This is a long email. Please take 30 minutes to read through the email in its entirety.

We’ve been operating partially under Holacracy and partially under the legacy management hierarchy in parallel for over a year now. Having one foot in one world while having the other foot in the other world has slowed down our transformation towards self-management and self-organization. While we’ve made decent progress on understanding the workings of the system of Holacracy and capturing work/accountabilities in Glass Frog, we haven’t made fast enough progress towards self-management, self-organization, and more efficient structures to run our business. (Holacracy is just one of many tools that can help move us towards self-management and self-organization, but simply abiding by the rules of Holacracy does not equal self-management or self-organization.)

After many conversations and a lot of feedback about where we are today versus our desired state of self-organization, self-management, increased autonomy, and increased efficiency, we are going to take a “rip the bandaid” approach to accelerate progress towards becoming a Teal organization (as described in the book Reinventing Organizations).

Something key to note here is that Holacracy just happens to be our current system in place to help facilitate our move to self-organization, and is one of many tools we plan to experiment with and evolve with in the future. Our main objective is not just to do Holacracy well, but to make Zappos a fully self-organized, self-managed organization by combining a variety of different tools and processes. Reinventing Organizations calls this type of organization a Teal organization. You’ll learn examples of successful Teal organizations below and in the book. Each of the companies cited below and in the book have different tools and processes to help with self-management and self-organization. We won’t necessarily adopt all of them, but instead we will experiment and figure out the right tools and processes for Zappos, using Holacracy as the initial starting point and continually evolving as we dive deeper into the world of self-management and self-organization.

Our immediate plan over the next few months:

– Teal organizations attempt to minimize service provider groups and lean more towards creating self-organizing and self-managing business-centric groups instead. As of 4/30/15, in order to eliminate the legacy management hierarchy, there will be effectively be no more people managers. In addition, we will begin the process of breaking down our legacy silo’ed structure/circles of merchandising, finance, tech, marketing, and other functions and create self-organizing and self-managing business-centric circles instead by starting to fund this new model with the appropriate resources needed to flourish. Functions that were previously silo’ed will be embedded inside these business-centric circles instead — this structure will require fewer roles that primarily manage expectations and drive alignment across legacy silos. We will continue using Holacracy’s systems and processes for prioritization and resource allocation, so it’ll be extremely important for all of us to keep Glass Frog up to date.

– To be clear, managers were absolutely necessary and valuable to the growth of Zappos over the years under our previous structure. Without managers, we would not have gotten to where we are today. Historically at Zappos the “manager” position contained a number of different responsibilities including people management, overseeing and approving decisions, budgeting, and professional development, as well as direct work on projects and goals for the good of the team. The people management aspects of the manager role are valuable in what the book refers to as Orange and Green organizations, but do not make sense in a self-organized and self-managing Teal organization. While we know that the full role of managers will no longer be necessary in a Teal organization, we’re also looking forward to seeing what new exciting contributions will come from the employees who were previously managers. All former managers who remain in good standing will still keep their salary through the end of 2015 even though their day-to-day work that formerly involved more traditional management will need to change. A new circle called Reinventing Yourself has been created to help guide former managers to new roles that might be a good match for their passions, skills, and experience. Hollie is the lead link of that new circle. (On our backend HRIS system, employees will still have “reporting” relationships solely for the purposes of maintaining compliance (e.g. SOX) requirements because we are part of a public company. This compliance requirement will be largely invisible to most employees and should not be confused with legacy reporting structures which will no longer exist.)

– Self-management and self-organization is not for everyone, and not everyone will want to move forward in the direction of the Best Customers Strategy and the strategy statements that were recently rolled out. As such, there will be a special version of “the offer” to everyone who reads Reinventing Organizations and/or meets some other criteria (outlined towards the end of this email).

– For better context, please read the two articles below first: Misperceptions of Self-Management and Five Crucial Competencies of Self-Management


Content is from: http://www.self-managementinstitute.org/misperceptions-of-self-management

June 12, 2014

By Frederic Laloux

Say “Self-Management” and almost everyone gets the wrong idea.

Self-managing structures are appearing everywhere, and get increasing attention in the media. They seem to be much more adaptative, agile, motivating than traditional pyramidal organizations, and they appear to achieve spectacular results. But is this a simple fad, or a new phenomenon destined to spread? And why are most people dismissive when you mention the possibility to run organizations “without a boss”?

Even though we are only now starting to get our heads around it, Self-Management is not a startling new invention by any means. It is the way life has operated in the world for billions of years, bringing forth creatures and ecosystems so magnificent and complex we can hardly comprehend them. Self-organization is the life force of the world, thriving on the edge of chaos with just enough order to funnel its energy, but not so much as to slow down adaptation and learning.

Leading scientists believe that the principal science of the next century will be the study of complex, autocatalytic, self-organizing, non-linear, and adaptive systems. This is usually referred to as “complexity” or “chaos theory”. For a long time, we thought the world operated based on Newtonian principles. We didn’t know better and thought we needed to interfere with the life’s self-organizing urge and try to control one another.

It seems we are ready now to move beyond rigid structures and let organizations truly come to life. And yet self-management is still such a new concept that many people frequently misunderstand what it is about and what it takes to make it work.

MISPERCEPTION 1: THERE IS NO STRUCTURE, NO MANAGEMENT, NO LEADERSHIP​

People who are new to the idea of Self-Management sometimes mistakenly assume that it simply means taking the hierarchy out of an organization and running everything democratically based on consensus. There is, of course, much more to it. Self-Management, just like the traditional pyramidal model it replaces, works with an interlocking set of structures, processes, and practices; these inform how teams are set up, how decisions get made, how roles are defined and distributed, how salaries are set, how people are recruited or dismissed, and so on.

What often puzzles us at first about self-managing organizations is that they are not structured along the control-minded hierarchical templates of Newtonian science. They are complex, participatory, interconnected, interdependent, and continually evolving systems, like ecosystems in nature. Form follows need. Roles are picked up, discarded, and exchanged fluidly. Power is distributed. Decisions are made at the point of origin. Innovations can spring up from all quarters. Meetings are held when they are needed. Temporary task forces are created spontaneously and quickly disbanded again. Here is how Chris Rufer, the founder and president of Morning Star, talks about the structure of self-managing organizations:

Clouds form and then go away because atmospheric conditions, temperatures, and humidity cause molecules of water to either condense or vaporize. Organizations should be the same; structures need to appear and disappear based on the forces that are acting in the organization. When people are free to act, they’re able to sense those forces and act in ways that fit best with reality.​

The tasks of management―setting direction and objectives, planning, directing, controlling, and evaluating―haven’t disappeared. They are simply no longer concentrated in dedicated management roles. Because they are spread widely, not narrowly, it can be argued that there is more management and leadership happening at any time in self-managing organizations despite, or rather precisely because of, the absence of fulltime managers.

MISPERCEPTION 2: EVERYONE IS EQUAL​

For as long as human memory goes back, the problem of power inequality has plagued life in organizations. Much of the pervasive fear that runs silently through organizations―and much of the politics, the silos, the greed, blaming, and resentment that feed on fear―stem from the unequal distribution of power.

Interestingly, the interlocking structures and processes allowing for self-organization do not resolve the question of power inequality; they transcend it. Attempting to resolve the problem of power inequality would call for everyone to be given the same power. Cooperatives, for instance, have sought in equal ownership a method to divide power equally. Interestingly, none of the organizations I have researched for the book Reinventing Organizations are employee-owned; the question of employee ownership doesn’t seem to matter very much when power is truly distributed.

The right question is not: how can everyone have equal power? It is rather: how can everyone be powerful? Power is not viewed as a zero-sum game, where the power I have is necessarily power taken away from you. Instead, if we acknowledge that we are all interconnected, the more powerful you are, the more powerful I can become. The more powerfully you advance the organization’s purpose, the more opportunities will open up for me to make contributions of my own.

Here we stumble upon a beautiful paradox: people can hold different levels of power, and yet everyone can be powerful. If I’m a machine operator―if my background, education, interests, and talents predispose me for such work―my scope of concern will be more limited than yours, if your roles involve coordinating the design of a whole new factory. And yet, if within what matters to me, I can take all necessary actions using the advice process, I have all the power I need.

This paradox cannot be understood with the unspoken metaphor we hold today of organizations as machines. In a machine, a small turn of the big cog at the top can send lots of little cogs spinning. The reverse isn’t true―the little cog at the bottom can try as hard as it pleases, but it has little power to move the bigger cog. The metaphor of nature as a complex, self-organizing system can much better accommodate this paradox. In an ecosystem, interconnected organisms thrive without one holding power over another. A fern or a mushroom can express its full selfhood without ever reaching out as far into the sky as the tree next to which it grows. Through a complex collaboration involving exchanges of nutrients, moisture, and shade, the mushroom, fern, and tree don’t compete but cooperate to grow into the biggest and healthiest version of themselves.

It’s the same in self-managing organizations: the point is not to make everyone equal; it is to allow all employees to grow into the strongest, healthiest version of themselves. Gone is the dominator hierarchy (the structure where bosses hold power over their subordinates). And precisely for that reason, lots of natural, evolving, overlapping hierarchies can emerge―hierarchies of development, skill, talent, expertise, and recognition, for example. This is a point that management author Gary Hamel noted about Morning Star:

Morning Star is a collection of naturally dynamic hierarchies. There isn’t one formal hierarchy; there are many informal ones. On any issue some colleagues will have a bigger say than others will, depending on their expertise and willingness to help. These are hierarchies of influence, not position, and they’re built from the bottom up. At Morning Star one accumulates authority by demonstrating expertise, helping peers, and adding value. Stop doing those things, and your influence wanes—as will your pay.​

So really, these organizations are anything but “flat,” a word often used for organizations with little or no hierarchy. On the contrary, they are alive and moving in all directions, allowing anyone to reach out for opportunities. How high you reach depends on your talents, your interests, your character, and the support you inspire from colleagues; it is no longer artificially constrained by the organization chart.

MISPERCEPTION 3: IT’S ABOUT EMPOWERMENT​

Many organizations today claim to be empowering. But note the painful irony in that statement. If employees need to be empowered, it is because the system’s very design concentrates power at the top and makes people at the lower rungs essentially powerless, unless leaders are generous enough to share some of their power. In self-managing organizations, people are not empowered by the good graces of other people. Empowerment is baked into the very fabric of the organization, into its structure, processes, and practices. Individuals need not fight for power. They simply have it. For people experiencing Self-Management for the first time, the ride can be bittersweet at first. With freedom comes responsibility: you can no longer throw problems, harsh decisions, or difficult calls up the hierarchy and let your bosses take care of it. You can’t take refuge in blame, apathy, or resentfulness. Everybody needs to grow up and take full responsibility for their thoughts and actions―a steep learning curve for some people. Former leaders and managers sometimes find it is a huge relief not having to deal with everybody else’s problems. But many also feel the phantom pain of not being able to wield their former positional power.

Many leading thinkers and practitioners in the field of organizational design focus their energy today on the question of how leaders can become more conscious. The thinking goes as follows: if only leaders could be more caring, more humble, more empowering, better listeners, more aware of the shadow they cast, they would wield their power more carefully and would create healthier and more productive organizations. Brian Robertson, the founder of Holacracy, put it well in a blog post:

We see attempts for leaders to develop to be more conscious, aware, awake, servant leaders that are empowering. … And yet, the irony: … If you need someone else to carefully wield their power and hold their space for you, then you are a victim. This is the irony of empowerment, and yet there is very little else we can do within our conventional operating system other than try our best to be conscious, empowering leaders.​

If we can’t think outside the pyramid, then indeed, as Robertson notes, the best we can do is try to patch up the unhealthy consequences of power inequality with more enlightened leadership. Pioneer self-managing organizations show that it’s possible to transcend the problem of power inequality and not just patch it up. We can reinvent the basic structures and practices of organizations to make everyone powerful and no one powerless.

MISPERCEPTION 4: IT’S STILL EXPERIMENTAL​

Another common misconception is that Self-Management might still be an experimental form of management. That is no longer true: Self-Management has proven its worth time and again, on both small and large scales and in various types of industry. W. L. Gore, a chemical manufacturing company best known for its Gore-Tex fabrics, has been operating on self-organizing principles since its founding in the late 1950s. Whole Foods, with its 60,000 employees and $9 billion in revenue, operates its more than 300 stores with self-governing units (the rest of the organization has more traditional hierarchical structures). Each store consists of roughly eight self-managing units, such as produce, seafood, and check-out (central services are run with a traditional, albeit empowered hierarchy).

The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra has operated since its founding in 1972 on entirely self-managing principles. The orchestra, with residence in New York’s Carnegie Hall, has earned rave reviews and is widely regarded as one of the world’s great orchestras. It operates without a conductor. Musicians from the orchestra make all artistic decisions, from choosing the repertoire to deciding how a piece ought to be played. They decide who to recruit, where to play, and with whom to collaborate.

Virtual and volunteer-driven organizations practice Self-Management on staggering scales. In 2012, Wikipedia had 100,000 active contributors. It is estimated that around the same number―100,000 people―have contributed to Linux. If these numbers sound large, they are dwarfed by other volunteer organizations. Alcoholics Anonymous currently has 1.8 million members participating in over 100,000 groups worldwide―each of them operating entirely on self-managing principles, structures, and practices.

I believe it is because we have grown up with traditional hierarchical organizations that we find it so hard to get our heads around Self-Management. Young people, on the other hand, who have grown up with the Web (variously referred to as Millennials, Generation Y) “get” self-management instinctively. On the web, management writer Gary Hamel notes:

No one can kill a good idea

Everyone can pitch in

Anyone can lead

No one can dictate

You get to choose your cause

You can easily build on top of what others have done

You don’t have to put up with bullies and tyrants

Agitators don’t get marginalized

Excellence usually wins (and mediocrity doesn’t)

Passion-killing policies get reversed

Great contributions get recognized and celebrated​

Many organizational leaders and human resource managers complain that Millennials are hard to manage. Indeed, this generation has grown up in the disruptive world of the Internet, where people’s influence is based on contribution and reputation, not position. Why would they want to put up with anything other than self-management in the workplace? Why would anyone else, for that matter?


Content is from: http://www.self-managementinstitute.org/five-crucial-competencies-of-self-management

April 17, 2014

By Doug Kirkpatrick

While there are many competencies that enable effective self-management (excellent communication skills, solid teamwork, good judgment), there are many other, less obvious competencies that impact one’s ability to navigate and perform at a high level in a self-managed ecosystem. Here are five candidates for consideration.

1) Taking Initiative. This characteristic is expressly called for in the Morning Star Colleague Principles. It’s very hard to deliver constructive feedback to colleagues or cause positive change in processes without a willingness to take the initiative to do so. Taking initiative includes the willingness and ability to speak up when necessary.

2) Tolerance for Ambiguity. Self-management can be messy as new colleagues meet new people, engage with new processes, and learn a new way of working. Negotiating a Colleague Letter of Understanding (CLOU) that clearly communicates one’s mission, process stewardships and performance metrics with affected stakeholders takes time and effort. Choices must be made regarding what requests to make of other colleagues and the timing and scope of those requests. Self-management is never as clear-cut as just going up to the boss with a comment or complaint.

3) Consciousness. It takes real effort to locate the energy needed to pursue one’s personal commercial mission consistently, every day. It is akin to the energy that entrepreneurs use to create entirely new enterprises out of ideas. Consciousness gives rise to awareness and presence, and is the source of confidence in one’s ability to get things done—even in the face of adversity. Awareness goes right to the heart of the Morning Star Colleague Principles—understanding one’s Rings of Responsibility requires a clear scope of awareness, especially in the primary ring.

4) Contribution Mindset. Peter Drucker talked about a contribution mindset in his 1966 book, The Effective Executive. A half-century later, that mindset applies to everyone who wants to be an effective self-manager in a self-managed enterprise. This competency is referenced in the Morning Star Colleague Principles, which create an affirmative obligation for individuals to share relevant information with colleagues even when not expressly requested.

5) Low Power Distance Sensitivity. Power distance refers to the concept of deferring to individuals perceived to have more power than oneself. In a self-managed environment (where collaboration is highly valued), there is an unofficial hierarchy of credibility, which springs from experience, trust, communication, and a host of other factors. This is not the same thing as a hierarchy of power based on command authority or control of others. Effective self-managers will find ways to express themselves to anyone in the organization, and will listen to anyone and everyone who wishes to talk with them. To cut off colleagues based on perceived status is to cut off information, the lifeblood of a self-managed organization. Communication is everything.

More information about the above from the author is in this video:

​


From Tony:

I was on a Skype call with Frederic Laloux, the author of Reinventing Organizations. During our call, he said that as we move towards a Teal, no-manager organization, there are two really important things that we should make sure we have in place to make sure employees still perform and are still accountable to the organization even though there are no more managers.

First, in the human body, there are antibodies that get activated when there’s a virus or disease. We need to make sure we have the same thing in our organization. We need to figure out what the antibodies are for when a small number employees take advantage of the freedom gained from being in a no-manager organization, or else it will demoralize the other employees. He said that in general, research has shown that peer-pressure based systems work the best. For certain types of job functions where there are easy metrics to measure performance, a public leaderboard ranking will naturally create peer pressure by showing which teams are performing and which aren’t. For other types of job functions where metrics are more difficult to come by, regular peer-based presentations have been shown to be really effective, where each team presents to the other teams (once a quarter) what they are working on and why it is adding value to the company, and that will create a natural peer pressure. He suggested simply asking employees for their ideas on how to create the peer pressure and to give them the antibody analogy/framework and encourage employees to figure out the antibody systems themselves rather than try to design it from the top down.

Second, as we move towards self-management and self-organization, we need to have a clear process for conflict resolution. There’s already a clear system described in the book (meet 1-1, and if that doesn’t work escalate to peer council, and if that doesn’t work then escalate to the CEO), which seems like an easy starting point that we can adjust as we learn what works and doesn’t work. However, conflict resolution starts with the expectation that employees are responsible for taking the first step and having a 1:1 conversation with whomever they are having a conflict with (instead of going to their manager for example). He said the most important thing is the need to have a strong conflict resolution process clearly communicated and clearly understood by everyone so employees know what to do.

As previously stated, self-management and self-organization is not for everyone, and not everyone will necessarily want to move forward in the direction of the Best Customers Strategy and the strategy statements that were recently rolled out. Therefore, there will be a special version of “the offer” on a company-wide scale, in which each employee will be offered at least 3 months severance (and up to 3 months of COBRA reimbursement for benefits) if he/she feels that self-management, self-organization, and our Best Customers Strategy and strategy statements as published in Glass Frog are not the right fit. (For employees that have been with Zappos for 4 or more years, the offer will be 1 month for every year worked at Zappos, along with up to 3 months of COBRA reimbursement for benefits.)

To qualify for the offer, you must:

– Be an employee in good standing

– Watch video of talk by the author of Reinventing Organizations -
​


– Read Reinventing Organizations by 4/15/15 or email a statement of non-intention to read to Arun and Hollie

– Give notice of your intention to leave anytime during the month of April 2015 if you intend to take the offer (exact last day of work TBD)

– Ensure a smooth transition of your prior responsibilities and accountabilities (as approved by Arun – please note that if you are working on a critical project, a longer transition time might be required)

Arun, Fred, Hollie, and I will be doing Q&A town hall sessions about our strategy statements and our new direction on Wednesday, 3/25/15, at 12 PM-12:30 PM, 1-1:30 PM, 2-2:30 PM, and 3-3:30 PM in the Council Chambers. Please attend any of these four town halls if you have any additional questions.

We won’t have all the answers to everything, and there are still plenty of important things for all of us to figure out together, including answers to the questions below (please email me any suggestions or if you’d like to be involved in helping figure out any of the areas below):

– What’s the right method for implementing the advice process as described in Reinventing Organizations?

– How is the contribution of each employee assessed and what are the compensation framework/processes in this new world of no managers?

– What is not currently captured in Glass Frog that we should make sure is captured?

– Should we update our purpose statement, and if so, what should our new purpose statement be?

– In light of these changes, should we delay and/or modify the next zPrize competition? (Prize-based competition is an example of another tool that can help accelerate self-organization.)

– What are the peer-pressure “antibody” systems we want to implement for the different types of job functions?

– What is the right conflict-resolution set of processes for Zappos?

– How do we support employee development and growth as a Teal organization?

– How do we ensure that we continue to meet our financial and Super Cloud commitments to Amazon for 2015 and beyond?

While I hope that there will be a lot of reflection around this email and our upcoming changes, we will still need to continue to execute on our Best Customers Strategy and honor our financial and Super Cloud commitments for 2015 and beyond. We still need to execute, so it will feel somewhat like trying to upgrade an airplane while we’re still flying in the air.

This is a new, exciting, and bold move for Zappos. Like all the bold steps we’ve done in the past, it feels a little scary, but it also feels like exactly the type of thing that only a company such as Zappos would dare to attempt at this scale. With our core values and culture as the foundation for everything we do, I’m personally excited about all the potential creativity and energy of our employees that are just waiting for the right environment and structure to be unlocked and unleashed.

I can’t wait to see how we reinvent ourselves, and I can’t wait to see what unfolds next.

-Tony
 
Re: Zappos offers to pay employees to quit if they reject Holacracy (major Colin ale

Zappos has been hyped-- and sought hype-- for almost a decade now but seems to really be getting into some different shit now. I think it's a lot of smoke and mirrors but I'm curious for thoughts from people knowledgeable of Zappos, Whole Foods, any other relevant or mentioned company, SEMCO or the cooperatives dismissed as not "seem(ing) to matter very much" above.

eewwll said:
I've been following zappos for years.. they are really getting a lot of exposure now that they've crossed a Billion dollars in revenues annually

I actually have read Semler's book "Maverick".. it's a great read.. and from what I here about his company here in Sao Paulo, they really live out most of the principles he discusses in his book....the key word is "most"..

yeah. I've read about Whole Feed's operational principles as well.
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eewwll said:
I remember when I read about (Zappos) actually offering new applicants a check on the spot if THEY DIDN'T TAKE THE JOB. I was like wtf?! lol. Yeah.. they've definitely been aggressive about selling other products besides just shoes... the CEO was like don't rule out Airlines, etc down the road..

Actually, that statement was not exactly "factual". Let me explain. You often hear that SEMCO is "not a democratic" as it seems. However, it often comes from disgruntled ex-employees.. but that is how the system works. The employees (not management) actually make decisions on new hires and also on firing people.. so if you aren't pulling your weight, your co-workers will actually fire you. So, I'm not sure if ex-employees are just jaded or if they are actually giving factual information about the company... but they never seem to be specific...I've often just heard here that some of the things in "Maverick" are just propaganda and just how things actually work.. but it's not like the sources are actually credible. Most outside consultants who get access seem to notice that things indeed seem to live up to the hoopla when they do independent evaluations of the company...

Sempler has even opened up a school here in Sao Paulo where kids get to choose their classes, hours, etc....even "create" their class if it doesn't already exists...he is trying to apply his concepts to education.
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Re: Zappos offers to pay employees to quit if they reject Holacracy (major Colin ale

interesting read
 
Re: Zappos offers to pay employees to quit if they reject Holacracy (major Colin ale

I just skimmed it but in all my years the only thing businesses care about is the bottom line. That's why it's called a business. So if they put some razzle-dazzle terminology on a move to increase profit why should that come as a surprise? It's ALWAYS about profit even when they say it's not.
 
Re: Zappos offers to pay employees to quit if they reject Holacracy (major Colin ale

Cutting out middle management. I've always said the only necessary people in a company are the ones at the bottom and the ones at the top.
 
Re: Zappos offers to pay employees to quit if they reject Holacracy (major Colin ale

Trying to turn generations of psychologically fucked up people that have been programmed to be slaves to play the role of bosses? It may work with a few thousand in a call center, but GL with making that shit work on a bigger stage.
 
Re: Zappos offers to pay employees to quit if they reject Holacracy (major Colin ale

I remember when I first went into their store here in Vegas. Those prices were outrageous. They didn't last long here. The store cleared out and moved elsewhere I guess because it's a Ross now.
 
Re: Zappos offers to pay employees to quit if they reject Holacracy (major Colin ale

knightmelodic said:
I just skimmed it but in all my years the only thing businesses care about is the bottom line. That's why it's called a business. So if they put some razzle-dazzle terminology on a move to increase profit why should that come as a surprise? It's ALWAYS about profit even when they say it's not.
Click to expand...

Chitownheadbusa said:
Trying to turn generations of psychologically fucked up people that have been programmed to be slaves to play the role of bosses? It may work with a few thousand in a call center, but GL with making that shit work on a bigger stage.
Click to expand...

Here's a better way to really empower workers (unlike Zappos, which I agree is razzle-dazzle propaganda):

Bernie Sanders' Campaign Issues Truly Extraordinary Campaign Plank:
The Vermont independent wants Americans to own the businesses they work at by creating worker co-ops
By Zaid Jilani
AlterNet
May 1, 2015

After his presidential announcement this week, many wondered how Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) would distinguish himself from the other candidates running in the Democratic primary.

With his newly-published issues page, he offers some clues.

Among the 12 platform planks that he published there are several traditional ideas such as rebuilding American infrastructure and guaranteeing health care to all. But the very last platform offers a genuinely fresh idea: boosting America's worker co-ops.

The Sanders campaign writes:

We need to develop new economic models to increase job creation and productivity. Instead of giving huge tax breaks to corporations which ship our jobs to China and other low-wage countries, we need to provide assistance to workers who want to purchase their own businesses by establishing worker-owned cooperatives. Study after study shows that when workers have an ownership stake in the businesses they work for, productivity goes up, absenteeism goes down and employees are much more satisfied with their jobs.​

In the United States, co-ops are often associated with small businesses such as coffee shops or groceries. But with the right regulatory incentives and support, worker-owned businesses can be much larger. Take the Mondragon corporation of Spain, for example. Today it has over 70,000 employees and brings in annual revenues of over $12 billion Euros. Within the various units of the corporation, workers decide on the direction of production for the company as well as what to do with the profits. While CEO-to-worker pay ratios in the United States have reached over 300-to-1, in Mondragon the cooperative model ensures that in most of its operations, “the ratio of compensation between top executives and the lowest-paid members is between three to one and six to one.”

Today, there are 11,000 worker-owned companies in America, and there are up to 120 million Americans who are involved in some form of co-op if you include credit unions in the tally. By endorsing their expansion, Sanders is proving that his differences with his opponents are not just in style but in substance – providing an alternative to the top-down corporations that run our economy.
 
Re: Zappos offers to pay employees to quit if they reject Holacracy (major Colin ale

200 Zappos workers take buyouts after company cuts managers
May 06, 2015
By Associated Press

LAS VEGAS (AP) -- Hundreds of employees are leaving the Las Vegas-based Zappos company headquarters as the retailer does away with traditional manager roles.

The Las Vegas Sun reports the company confirmed Tuesday that 210 workers had opted for buyouts, or about 14 percent of its 1,503 employees.

The company has said it is restructuring to a "self-organization" accountability system and "people manager" positions were eliminated April 30.

CEO Tony Hsieh also spoke at the Collision technology conference Tuesday, making reference to Zappos' changing hierarchical structure.

He compared the move to the organic structure of the Internet growing without a central authority.

The company was founded in 1999 in San Francisco and moved to Las Vegas in 2004. It was acquired by Amazon in 2009.
 
Amid holacracy, 50 Zappos employees agree to buyouts
By Daniel Rothberg, Las Vegas Sun (contact)

Wednesday, Jan. 13, 2016 | 4:27 p.m.

Online retailer Zappos, which offered buyouts last year when it changed to a self-management system known as holacracy, has announced an additional 50 buyouts.

The latest round of buyouts involves employees working on a project known as Super Cloud to help Zappos migrate to the back-end computer infrastructure used by its parent company, Amazon.

It brings the total number of buyouts since CEO Tony Hsieh announced them in March to 260 employees, about 18 percent of the workforce.

When Zappos switched to holacracy, an alternative management structure whereby employees are organized by roles rather than titles, the company offered a package for employees who felt holacracy was not the right fit for them. The offer included at least three months’ severance.

Employees working on the Super Cloud project were given an extension until the end of the year to take the buyouts.

“While we have lost a number of folks, it is important to note that we have a significant group of highly talented individuals who will be staying to help move Zappos forward,” said Arun Rajan, a Zappos executive who announced the buyouts. His memo was posted on the Zappos website.

He said the 50 buyouts for employees on the Super Cloud team were in line with the company’s expectations. Rajan said the company expects to complete the Super Cloud project this quarter, despite wanting to have it done by the end of last year.

Having the employees stay on longer than other employees who took buyouts last year helped mitigate risk with the project, Rajan said.

Rajan told Quartz today that the majority of those who took the recent buyouts were managers. If there were no buyout takers, there likely would have been layoffs, he said.

Zappos, headquartered in downtown Las Vegas, is known for a quirky culture that values customer service and experimentation.

During a speech in October, Hsieh said at least half of the buyouts were taken for reasons other than holacracy. Some employees had already been planning to leave to pursue their own projects or for personal reasons, he said.
 
I stopped fucking with zappos because I got the vibe they had Low key racist hiring
Practices after I seen a group picture......

And yea zappos prices are foolish..

I get better deals buying directly from
The brand..
 
So how did the management style work for them? Are the still using it? Have profits/share price increase? Will Colin ever allow me to read all that shit?
 
www.nytimes.com

After Tony Hsieh’s Shocking Death, Zappos Looks to Move Forward

Kedar Deshpande, who took over as C.E.O. in August, needs to lead the shoe seller out of the pandemic, while maintaining what his predecessor built.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com

It was never going to be easy to succeed Tony Hsieh, the celebrated chief executive of Zappos, who turned a tiny online shoe seller into a $1 billion behemoth through an obsessive focus on corporate culture and happy employees. But Kedar Deshpande took over at a particularly fraught time.

Zappos, which is owned by Amazon, was already navigating remote work and grappling with pandemic-driven changes in how people shop when Mr. Hsieh abruptly retired in August after two decades, which led Mr. Deshpande to be named C.E.O. Then in November, tragedy struck: Mr. Hsieh, 46, died from injuries suffered in a house fire in New London, Conn., sending shock waves throughout the roughly 1,500-person company, as well as tech and entrepreneurial circles.

Since then, it has been reported that Mr. Hsieh had been behaving erratically for months and that friends had considered staging an intervention last summer. The revelations brought new scrutiny to the circumstances of his exit from Zappos.

Mr. Deshpande, who was previously Zappos’s chief operating officer, said that when Mr. Hsieh told him last summer that he wanted to pursue other projects, he did not push back.

“From my experience working with Tony, Tony always believed in the things that he wanted to change,” Mr. Deshpande said in an interview, his first as chief executive. “I asked him, ‘Hey, Tony, are you sure?’ And he said, ‘Yes, I want to retire’ — so that was the end of the conversation.”

Now, Mr. Deshpande, 42, is tasked with shepherding Zappos through the late stages of the pandemic and into the company’s next phase as an online retailer, without Mr. Hsieh’s guidance. He must also show whether the company’s culture of “fun and a little weirdness” in Las Vegas can survive without its chief architect.

“The Covid situation and everything else going on makes it very tough, particularly with a culture that is built on physical proximity and happiness associated with that,” Mr. Deshpande said in the Zoom interview, from his home in Henderson, Nev. But he said he was optimistic about the future, especially given the decade he had spent at Zappos in different roles. “The culture is not just one person or two people,” he said.

There was apparently no long-term succession plan when Mr. Hsieh stepped down. Zappos’s board, which consists of Amazon and Zappos employees, elevated Mr. Deshpande to the role. The company, founded in 1999, has long functioned as an independent unit within Amazon, which acquired it for $1.2 billion in July 2009 and does not disclose its financials.

It’s tough for a person to replace a C.E.O. with an outsize personality like Mr. Hsieh, said Erik Gordon, a professor at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, who anticipated that Zappos’s culture will face some changes under new leadership.

“The person who takes over from the founder who created the culture doesn’t have the authenticity or moral authority that the founder had,” Mr. Gordon said. “Can he maintain the same spirit of fun and a little weirdness and positive team spirit?”

Zappos, which derives its name from “zapatos,” the Spanish word for shoes, was an early e-commerce success story under Mr. Hsieh, who wrote a best-selling book in 2010, “Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose.” It argued that a company’s top priority should be its culture and that keeping employees happy translated into success with customers.

The company, which moved from the Bay Area to southern Nevada in 2004 and now has a campus in downtown Las Vegas, developed a reputation for being a fun, almost cultlike place to work, where employees regularly socialized at work and outside the office. The company has claimed that it is harder to get a job at Zappos than it is to get into Harvard.

Mr. Deshpande said Zappos employees had become closer in some ways in the past year as they brought family or pets into the remote-work fold.

“When we have Halloween contests, it’s the entire family that is participating,” said Mr. Deshpande, who has two young daughters. He described packages Zappos sent to employees and their families for activities like planting herb gardens or performing science experiments.

He guessed that employees would start returning to the office after July 1 and were likely to develop hybrid schedules with some remote and some in-person work.

...
 
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