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But while equality sounds like an inspiring ideal, operating a business without formal hierarchy can be tricky in practice. In 2013 former Valve employee Jeri Ellsworth denounced the company’s “pseudo-flat structure,” noting that there was a “hidden layer of powerful management structure in the company” that “felt a lot like high school.”
Working in a company where everyone is considered your equal sometimes means that nobody wants to take responsibility for addressing toxic behavior, former and current cooperative members have said. The decision to lay off people or otherwise confront bad behavior becomes especially difficult when the bad news has to be delivered not by a boss, but by peers or even friends. As is common for small businesses, some of these companies have no formal, standing HR structure. Layoffs are often decided through a collective vote, with members saying they prefer to retrain staff or take collective pay cuts instead of firing people.
Even in the best of cases, democratic decision making can “easily become a politics nightmare,” Berthier said. Motion Twin tries to avoid such nightmares by staying away from meetings as much as possible and keeping things small. Its team is capped at around 10 employees. “Legally speaking, we can debate everything,” he said. “But if we do that, it can last until the end of time—and we might be dead, and the game will not be released.”
If they’re having that much trouble managing a team of just
ten, then it’s like, what the hell is the rest of the industry gonna look like under that model. Exceptions like Valve are due to the fact they are highly established, primarily as an online marketplace. They can afford to basically run on autopilot, and release projects like Alyx
at a loss.
The bottom line is human organizations need leadership of some kind to be successful. It’s just what humans and even some animal species respond to, and the biggest obstacle isn’t leadership itself so much as plain shitty leadership. Unsurprisingly the causes of that are a bit of a conundrum though.