The No-Boss Business Model Is Flawed

Photo by Hans-Peter Gauster on Unsplash

This morning I came across an interesting article at Aeon that struck a chord with me titled No Boss? No Thanks. It brought to mind a bad experience I had between 15 and 20 years ago dealing with a very flat organization that had no bosses. Everyone in the company was a "boss" sort of. The opening sentence hooked me in as did the lines that followed:

Management thinking is notoriously faddish. One week, the gurus, star CEOs, pundits and professors are talking about downsizing as the solution to corporate bureaucracy and inefficiency. The next week, the bandwagon has moved on to knowledge-management. Then to empowerment. And so on – sometimes in cycles, such that old ideas are revived, dressed up and resold to a gullible audience. Serious thinkers might pooh-pooh all this as guru talk, driven by media hype and ‘thought leaders’ hawking their latest books.

What is interesting is when one idea is pushed from the top down as the way to proceed and then the following year a new approach is propagated that directly contradicts the first. The ideas a pushed by "authorities" whose books become bestsellers and therefore the ideas must be good, right?

After giving several examples of fads (a few of which I experienced at one time) Nikolai Fossi and Peter Klein, authors of the No Boss? No Thanks piece, proceed to discuss the super-flat organization.

The concept is, in essence, a reaction against the dehumanizing effect of corporate culture. It is also an attempt to empower everyone in the organization. The problem comes when you make the company so flat that no one is in charge. There is no leadership. "We're all leaders here."

Sounds good in theory, but what happens in practice? What about decisions regarding company direction? Or when customers are mis-handled?

I was responsible for the advertising and signage at our local airport when a new vendor was selected to manage the interior design space there. The company was a "flat" organization with everyone on the same level. Each was a boss or supervisor or whatever. The contracts were created with someone who seemed capable, but when it came time to execute the plan problems ensued.

Before long I had a different rep. There were unresolved issues and I wanted to speak to her supervisor to address the way our account was being handled. That is when I learned the problem of flat organizations. There was no one higher up the chain of command. When I tried to address the issue by speaking with others in the company it was always bounced back to the problem person.

As the Aeon article's authors observe, "Someone needs to be held accountable for the firm’s actions – the buck has to stop somewhere."

If I recall correctly, Peter Drucker addresses this issue in The Effective Executive by pointing out that when there is a fire, someone has to dictate, "OK, everyone run this way and head out that exit."

Leaders don't have to micromanage every dot and tittle, but when the occasion calls for it, someone has to take charge and make a decision. Drucker emphatically states that making decisions is the key responsibility of leadership.

The bottom line here, again citing Aeon, is what you might expect: "As should be clear by now, we think that the bossless-company narrative has been badly oversold by its proponents."

I'm not suggesting that there is a perfect way to run an organization. Let's face it, businesses are made up of persons, people who are also struggling with issues of meaning, concealing areas of incompetence, pride and insecurities.

When all is said and done, this article is a pretty darned-good read. No Boss? No Thanks.

Here is the URL should the link be dead:
https://aeon.co/essays/no-boss-no-thanks-why-managers-are-more-important-than-ever