[dentemple]

Without a firm proposal of what a company can or should do instead, this just becomes another example of complaints being easier to make than actual solutions. We all know that large corps are structured in a way that eliminates individual initiative. So what can we do about it?

I've heard of "hierarchy-less" company structures being attempted before. I've also heard that each and every one of those attempts always ended up with hierarchies anyway, only now they became "shadow" hierarchies, unofficial and undocumented. Because that's just how human nature works. Not everyone can stay locked in on what every else is doing while still also keeping up with their own responsibilities, so other people get deferred to instead.

Is there happy middle-ground that can be found here? Is there any research out that offers tree-less company structures that might actually work in the real world?

[antipurist]

I'm not aware of any relevant research, but to answer the "So what can we do about it?" question I have a wild idea: invert the power structure, with cooperative of workers hiring their managers instead of managers hiring workers. And no, this doesn't automatically lead to the same tree, just inverted, it could form a much flatter structure.

I imagine that a cooperative can hire a person who measures the value generated by each worker/team, and then the cooperative members agree upon compensation readjustment.

Then each person/team can hire a manager to help them generate more value if they can't keep track of what's going on within the cooperative without that help.

This way you might get a completely flat structure where each IC decides if they need someone to boss them around or not, and to what extent. Or it might devolve into a typical hierarchy if every IC fully delegates their decision-making, priority-setting, and coordination to their manager, but that devolution will be a bottom-up process, not a result of top-down pressure.

Can this work? No idea.

[voakbasda]

Don’t stop with work. Governments need to be rebuilt from the ground up. Local first, with taxes flowing there first, and only then do they start to trickle up to the county, state, regional, or federal levels.

Central governments should be emergent properties of local systems working together, not a choke point of all power and taxation revenue. The current system is completely backwards, if democracy and representation are truly the ideals that it embodies

How do we get from here to either new status quo? Bloody revolution. The powers-that-be have made it clear that they will only give up their control over their dead bodies.

[MathMonkeyMan]

I haven't studied history or political science, but I suspect that a bunch of cooperating individual local municipalities can as easily lead to war as to federalism.

The Federalist Papers talk a lot about factionalism versus tyranny. On a larger scale, look at how long it took what are now European Union members to stop warring with each other.

[jleyank]

Greek city states and German petty kingdoms suggest conflict and failure to unite vs external threats common.

[andyferris]

One problem I see is even in representational democracy (I'll use the Westminster system for concreteness) we get a lot of indirection leading to policies people don't actually want. Even more indirection is bad.

Assume members of parliament are chosen fairly (popular vote approximates number of seats etc). The winning party (or parties) form a cabinet - their own little hierarchy. What we tend to see is a majority of cabinet members voting in cabinet for a policy, a majority of their caucus voting to support their policy (relying on cabinet solidarity to get the numbers across the line), then a majority of parliament passing a bill (using the solidarity of the party to get it across the line). The agenda may have been set by just a few parliamentarians (say just 9 out 17 cabinet members in a parliament of ~100) and an unpolular policy comes to pass.

I'd fear having local representatives choosing state representatives choosing federal representatives would have even worse outcomes in terms of representing the individuals at the "bottom" of this process. There is a reason representatives are voted for directly at each level of governments in our democracies - this wasn't a "simplification" it was a deliberate choice by our forebearers who had seen how politics shakes out in practice.

[perilunar]

> local representatives choosing state representatives choosing federal representatives

You don't have to have that though. You can still have a local population electing local, state, and federal representatives. But you need the taxation, and thus the financial power, to flow upwards from local government, not downwards from federal governments.

[perilunar]

> Local first, with taxes flowing there first, and only then do they start to trickle up...

Works well with Georgism. If all tax is land and resources, it makes sense to collect locally. If most of your tax is income and company tax, it's bound to be collected at state or federal levels.

I've always believed that power should be devolved to the lowest level possible, but you're right that powers-that-be will not willingly give up centralised power.

[maxerickson]

In the US, local governments are often far worse than state and federal governments.

In general, it's because it's harder for the larger entities to get away with playing favorites (I'm not saying it doesn't happen, I'm saying that it happens a lot more in smaller units).

Paying all your taxes to the corrupt local judge (county official) is in fact not a win.

[LordGronk]

It’s also that, with the current system, a person who is young, talented, and ambitious who is interested in public service has little to no reason nor incentive to work outside the beltway or a state capital, leaving local governance to retirees and incompetents.

[mrkstu]

And developers

[perilunar]

But local governments are much easier to leave than state or federal governments. And easier to influence if you decide to stay.

[interludead]

The more interesting question is whether you can make higher levels of government depend more explicitly on lower levels, instead of the other way around

[jimbokun]

Probably need to motivate people to vote in local elections before you can convince them to risk their lives in a bloody struggle.

[wolvesechoes]

Reminder that Greeks were right and representative democracy is not democracy at all, but another form of oligarchy.

[YZF]

Want to find out? Start a new company with this idea. I worked at a tech company where the founders wanted to do things differently so they did. Not exactly what you describe but generally more power to the individuals vs. management. It worked reasonably well until the company grew large, acquired another large company, and was eventually acquired by yet another company.

[jimbokun]

Yeah a lot of management isn’t just a desire for power and control over others, but just the unglamorous and boring work of tracking what everyone is working on and how it fits into the bigger picture. In large organizations it becomes harder and harder for individual contributors to see how their work fits into the larger organization.

[lowercased]

"In large organizations it becomes harder and harder for individual contributors to see how their work fits into the larger organization."

... because the planning and reasoning and vision aren't shared? As an IC - in small and large companies - I would often get this "you just don't understand" and "you don't see the big picture". Well.. because it's not shared. Decisions made in secret, or in boardrooms without any transparency... yeah - of course I don't have the full picture. I bet half the upper management doesn't either - they all just have their slices.

Some companies - typically smaller - sometimes have shared details on direction/vision/etc enough so that everyone could have a common shared sense of purpose and goals. But I've found that to be relatively rare.

[jimbokun]

Yes, good management is rare.

I believe companies where ICs understand how their role ties into the overall success of the company will outperform other companies on average.

[rcxdude]

Maybe, there is an aspect of things being deliberately kept hidden, but also communicating this stuff is just pretty hard. Large organizations often spend huge amounts of effort on it and still get things wrong.

[Nasrudith]

That is making a big assumption that is completely counterfactual. That a cooperative can hire a person who measures the value generated per worker/item and agree upon compensation readjustment. Humanity tried that with Gosplan. It worked pretty terribly.

We've had plenty of intelligista think that it would just go perfectly we followed their 'rational' plans. It has been without an exception an exercise in hubris. These 'reformers' keep on stepping on the rake labeled Goodhart's law.

[weakfish]

Someone should coin a law that any time something vaguely cooperative or worker-focused is proposed, someone will inevitably reply that it will fail because the Soviet Union did something sort of maybe similar once.

[TheOtherHobbes]

It can work, but ultimately it depends on the culture.

Europe has some corpo-sized co-ops, and while they're not perfect they seem to function better than anything in the US.

It won't work in the US at scale, ever, because US business culture is fundamentally hierarchical, competitive, entitled, selfish, and extractive.

Cooperation at scale is a completely alien concept in the US. Expedient synergies can be workable, but free-wheeling open decision making to benefit customers is only viable in small companies. And often not even then.

So it's dog eat dog. If you're not one of the predators you're the prey.

"Being the boss" of any business that's heading for IPO becomes an attempt to avoid being prey - which implies becoming one of the predators, and being comfortable with that.

If you don't start there your investors will still drag you in that direction, and remove you if you're not willing.

[weakfish]

Gonna write a shorter reply because I’m on my phone and frankly too hungry to think, so hopefully it makes sense :-)

TL;DR I agree with you re: US culture being too selfish and independent for that kind of thinking. It’s something that has had my curiosity for awhile and lends to another argument I’ve tried to make - that when people say collectivist economic systems won’t work because humans are “inherently selfish,” I think they’re confusing human nature with cultural conditioning. I don’t pretend to know how to change that cultural conditioning, but I think it’s narrow minded to assume that because one’s culture is perhaps selfish, then humans are as well.

[jimbokun]

You would need an explanation for how every single culture in human history conditions people in this way, if it’s not connected to human nature.

[lstodd]

If people keep suggesting solutions that were tried and failed of course other people will point that out.

1930-s Gosplan, 1950-s Gosplan, OGAS, Cybersyn, they all failed. Come up with something new maybe?

[Thlom]

Cybersyn was an experiment and we don't really know if it would have worked or not because the USA arranged for a military coup to destroy it ...

[lstodd]

I think later systems were at a core an attempt to implement something like high-frequency (which is a misnomer, it's more like low-latency) trading over 1960-70s tech at a scope that we still have no means to do now, in 2020s.

"trading" was ideologically prohibited term which didn't help any.

And the whole centralized approach cannot scale.

So there you have it: it can't work, please bring new ideas.

[DoctorOetker]

I think people could try social experiments and compare the productivity differences resulting from different management styles on LLMs instead of humans.

[weakfish]

My point is that they’re not the same thing and it’s an attempt to link two things that are loosely related, at best.

“Come up with something new maybe?” Is a trite attempt at belittling a conversation that is seeking knowledge and frankly just annoying.

[EA-3167]

It’s a desperate attempt by people who understand that identifying huge problems in the easy part. So much of life is just people thinking that by identifying the problem they’re 99% of the way to fixing it.

But apply this to something you understand in detail, unlike a whole society. “That guy has a bad heart, better fix it!” That’s something that doesn’t need to be said, never mind repeated like a solution to a hard problem.

[jimbokun]

It certainly has to be considered.

China and the Soviet Union are the largest scale attempts to implement a cooperative system and they failed in spectacular and tragic ways. So you certainly need to consider why the new plan will be different and won’t meet the same fate.

[HWR_14]

China failed? They seem to be doing well to me.

[jimbokun]

Their Communist system failed. They experienced increasing prosperity when they adopted capitalism.

[weakfish]

"Cooperative system" is such an immensely broad net. I could also say that the largest scale attempt ever at implementing a competitive system failed when the market crashed in 2008, so you probably shouldn't try starting a company again. But that would be silly, wouldn't it?

For whatever it's worth, I'm not a communist or a Soviet apologist or what have you. I also just think it's incredibly silly that Westerners are so conditioned to jump at the hint of the Soviet's shadow when there's any suggestion that capitalism might not be the most effective economic system.

The common counterpoint to that is "capitalism isn't perfect, but it's the best we got!" And maybe I'm naive, but I can't help but think humans can do way better. Isn't capitalism supposed to be a bet on human ingenuity? Then why do we pretend that humans are inherently limited when it comes to creating a good society?

[jimbokun]

I’m not saying you can’t argue for more cooperative systems. I’m saying you better be prepared to explain why your proposed system will work better than Soviet and Chinese communist systems when asked if you want to be taken seriously.

[EA-3167]

Rationalists struggle to understand just how irrational people are at scale. In fact they think up these big utopian plans as a way to reinforce the notion that we’re just one good rationalist away from paradise.

Edit spelling

[jimbokun]

Also an unwillingness to examine their own irrational biases, seeing them only in other people.

[aleqs]

I believe something like this is the future... fully open and cooperative organizational structures, where members fund projects and all decision making and financing is fully transparent. Also no idea whether it could actually work, but I don't see why not. The open source movement/community shows us a lot is possible.

[baddash]

Look into Haier's RenDanHeYi philosophy. One of my ambitions is to adopt that model when I start a company, and I think it is awesome and the future.

BTW, seems like we think similarly regarding this. Wanna exchange contact info? my email is [e-mail] if you're interested in connecting

[wahern]

That's how the oldest European universities worked originally, the students hired the teachers. I don't remember how long that system lasted or exactly why it ended, but the history might be instructive.

[rexpop]

"a person who measures the value generated by each worker/team" seems... impossible.

[jimbokun]

The only mechanism like that I’m aware of is the market, but a large organization shields smaller teams and individuals from being measured by it.

[jimbokun]

Like hiring a personal trainer to yell at you to do 5 more pushups or whatever.

Closest thing I can come up with of one party having the authority of paying another party to act as if they were in a position of authority over tre first party.

[fakedang]

Reminds me of Medvedev and Putin.

[rainsford]

I'd be curious if there was research in the opposite direction able to prove that hierarchy is necessary in large organizations if you want to do BigCorp scale things. Intuitively it seems like this might be both a reasonable and a provable conclusion.

No matter how smart they are or how well-intentioned, it seems improbable that 10,000 individual contributors running around doing whatever they think is best will ever result in engineering a new airplane, for example. Even setting aside the thousands of integration points and schedule dependencies such a project requires, some person or small group of persons needs to decide what kind of airplane they're designing and force everyone to stick with that decision.

I think the solution, such as it is, might be in looking for the minimum amount of hierarchy necessary for the scale of what you're doing, and being honest with yourself about that scale. And that goes in both directions. Small startups shouldn't try to organize like big corporations, and big corporations should stop pretending they can behave like small startups while trying to conquer the world.

[perilunar]

> it seems improbable that 10,000 individual contributors running around doing whatever they think is best will ever result in engineering a new airplane, for example.

Individuals and small groups build new airplanes all the time. It's only large aeroplanes that require large teams of people.

[fernie]

> if you want to do BigCorp scale things

I think they were specifically talking about those large aeroplanes

[MithrilTuxedo]

>Is there any research out that offers tree-less company structures that might actually work in the real world?

Elinor Ostrom's design principles for managing common pool resources (2009 econ Nobel) indicate that nested enterprises have been necessary to scale throughout human history.

[nisegami]

The people doing the actual work should have secretaries, not managers.

[dentemple]

I'll be sure to bring that up at my next team meeting.

[BrenBarn]

> We all know that large corps are structured in a way that eliminates individual initiative. So what can we do about it?

Well one thing is to break up large corporations into small pieces.

[marssaxman]

> So what can we do about it?

For starters, you can understand that working for a large corporation will make you miserable, and choose to work in a small organization instead.

[rainsford]

That might be a valid solution on the individual level, but it seems problematic if we want the kinds of things only a large organization can realistically produce. In addition to small organizations that can act as a source of employment for people who absolutely can't stand a corporate hierarchy, we also need large corporations that don't suck, or at least suck the minimum necessary amount to attract people less averse to having a boss. At least if we want things like airliners and what not.

[xboxnolifes]

Individually, one can try to choose for a small org. Collectively, there isn't enough small org work to go around.

[jimbokun]

There is if you start one yourself.

[foxygen]

And who will you hire if everyone decides to do that?

[NewEntryHN]

Maybe shadow hierarchy are still more productive than official ones? Looks like something that wouldn't have that many meetings.

[ornornor]

I worked briefly in a “holacracy” type of company. Absolutely hated it. There was a hierarchy, you just didn’t know about it unless you’d been there a while.

The company acted high and mighty like they have principles, the most successful project that was bringing most of the revenue in got a lot of leeway to bypass all ethical review processes so that it could keep feeding the rest of the company’s more ethical but not very profitable projects.

I hated working there and left after a couple months only. Incidentally, that was my last job ever and the straw that broke the camel’s back: I’ve worked freelance ever since.

[interludead]

I think the middle ground probably isn't "no hierarchy" but "less fake hierarchy"

[mempko]

There are firm proposals. Read the Democracy and Work effort lead by Richard Wolff.

[foobarian]

You know, you know how communism was supposed to be this nirvana where a central authority would collect all the information and dictate all operations for the good of the people? I.e. centrally planned economy? And in practice it didn't work out because of corruption and information bottlenecks and such?

I wonder if a corporation type org could actually make this work by going all in on AI deeply integrated into everything, code commits, tickets, slack, emails.. directing everything. So basically one boss with infinite bandwidth, that foresees and proactively preempts shadow hierarchies that are bound to form. Would be an interesting experiment.

[faidit]

USSR tried to digitize economy (OGAS) under Khrushchev but project was killed by pen and paper bureaucrats scared for their jobs. They barely would have had the resources to set it up though. Chile under Allende tried a similar short-lived socialist computer economy project called Cybersyn before the coup.

Marx apologists often point out he did not believe Russia could bypass capitalism on its own, without help from more advanced socialist countries formed by revolutions in the industrialized West. He also said the cotton gin was the engine of revolution and new technology has to come first before a new social system. The well known failures of command economies aside, arguably it did work with the right policies, especially when compared to other developing countries, it just didn't grow as fast as Western capitalism. The USSR didn't so much collapse as it was shut down by decree bc the leaders looked at the numbers and decided to give up.

Maybe the hypothetical bossless corp will be accidentally created by capitalism as more and more management positions are eliminated to save money.

[vhantz]

Huge corporations like Walmart and Amazon are actually proof that central planning works. And that not planning internally is not viable, as Sears demonstrated.

But this internal planning is not enough and comes up against the limits of capitalism: production for profit and not for need, the market and the nation state. All these contributed to create a system where "too much is produced", that is too much compared to what can be sold for profit, not what is needed.

Ultimately what was missing in the Soviet Union, the democratic aspect of planning, is also what is missing today (on top of the other issues that come with production for profit).

Explained here better than can be done in a HN comment: https://www.marxist.ca/article/the-need-for-a-socialist-plan...

[rexpop]

> You know, you know how communism was supposed to be this nirvana where a central authority would collect all the information and dictate all operations for the good of the people?

Was it? Really? Doesn't sound like a commune to me. Sounds more like Walmart[0]. Marx did not specify a particular planning strategy; in fact, his co-author Engels said that "the time of... small conscious minorities at the head of masses lacking consciousness is past."

Peter Kropotkin envisions a decentralized, federated economy of communes. Murray Bookchin advocates for decentralized, directly democratic municipalities that federate and coordinate economic decisions from the bottom up. Rosa Luxemburg--co-founder of the Communist Party of Germany who famously warned "socialism or barbarism"--consistently critiqued centralism, asserting, eg "the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee."

"The essence of socialist society," Luxemburg declares in her 1918 What Does the Spartacus League Want?[1], "consists in the fact that the great laboring mass ceases to be a dominated mass, but rather, makes the entire political and economic life its own life and gives that life a conscious, free, and autonomous direction."

Whether or not that sounds particularly pleasant or effective, it's clearly not a proposal for central-planning.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People%27s_Republic_of_Wal... 1. https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/12/14.htm

[foobarian]

TBH I don't know where that meme came from, it's something they used to harp on in Yugoslav schools before the breakup. But as a concept it certainly exists and I will beg your forgiveness for mixing it up with the history of socialism ideas salad. The point still doesn't change, can central planning finally succeed with smart enough technology such as new crop of AI seems to be? With fewer greedy/corrupt humans in the loop?

[forshaper]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission-type_tactics

Disasters and the initial push of any war show what is possible. Like the playbook is already know. Strict hierarchy with decision making power at the bottom. This may sound contradictory, sure.

However, it works like this: the top sets a goal, the bottom decides how to get it done. Person closest to the problem then leads.

We know it works. It happens every time a large group -needs- to use it.

However, as soon as things get stable, large orgs go right back to rigid central control.

[dentemple]

Thank you for the resource!

[theknarf]

Yes, its called Team Topologies.

[rexpop]

Instead of massive, centralized corporations, consider the highly successful family firms in Emilia-Romagna[0], as a model. These businesses have thrived for generations in a highly competitive global market not through rigid corporate chains of command, but through decentralized networks of mutuality, adaptability, and a highly skilled and committed workforce.

Even massive capitalist firms like Goldman Sachs or Exxon-Mobil essentially operate "communistically" internally to get anything done, ie when someone needs a wrench, a coworker hands it to them without asking what they get in return.

0. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-05-30/from-f...