Holacracy, Explained: An Illustrated Guide to Management-Free Organizations - Page19
Have you heard about Holacracy? If you’re watching the startup and tech scene, then there’s a pretty good chance you have. Holacracy is a management-free way to run a company. It’s been around for a few years, but it may have come to your attention just recently when its inventor, Brian Robertson, released a book on the concept. Another place you might have recently heard about Holacracy is in the media when Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO, asked his employees to either fully buy in to the company’s holacracy initiative or take their leave (along with a nice little bonus to sweeten the exit). Even before all the media buzz, we at Blinkist were fascinated with Holacracy. One thing that we noticed along the way is that there’s a huge breach between how simple and efficient Holacracy can make work and how not simple it is to understand. At Blinkist, we have a few years and nearly 1,000 business-books’-worth of experience making complex content accessible. 1. Share this Share this 2. Share this 4.
What it’s like to work for Stripe
A company’s culture is something intangible and nebulous, and yet it can be just as important to success as revenues or growth. Culture influences everything, from design and product implementation to the level of support and operations of a company. It’s crucial to get it right. I’ve been at Stripe for a few months now, and I’ve wanted to write about what it’s like to work there. I’ve never been more impressed by the mechanics and culture of a startup. Culture can be hard to define, and it certainly can’t be created with mission statements and performance reviews. Email - complete transparency By convention, every email at Stripe is CC-ed to lists that go to either the entire company or to any particular team. It turns out that Stripe generates a lot of email. This requires a lot of filtering, of course, but it allows me to dip in and out of the company’s fire hose whenever I want. I’ve never before seen this level of access or trust at a company. All hands Group activities Paper reading
Email transparency
UPDATE: in December 2014 (about a year and half after this post), we blogged about our experiences scaling email transparency. A few months ago, Alex blogged about how we work at Stripe. In the post, he described how almost all of Stripe’s email is public inside the company. Since then, many people have asked about how this email openness actually works. Is it really the case all our mail is copied to a list? This post is an attempt to describe a little more about why we do this and how we stay afloat. Background Initially, the motivation for having all email be internally public and searchable was simply to make us more efficient. As we’ve grown, the experiment has become about both efficiency and philosophy. We value autonomy, rigorous debate, and avoiding hierarchy to the extent that we can. It also makes it more likely that controversial issues are addressed as they arise, counteracting inevitable conflict-avoidance tendencies. Tools We use Gmail for email and Google Groups for lists.
Ben Kamens, Email transparency at Khan Academy
Whenever we mention that almost all Khan Academy email is visible to everybody on the team, people always wanna know more. The idea is unapologetically copied from Stripe. Whether they originally came up with it or not I dunno (edit: they did). Step 1) Read Stripe’s post.Step 2) Get forwarded Stripe’s post by at least 3 other devs within a couple days.Step 3) Implement a super hacky version of Stripe’s post That all happened ~10 months ago. Every team has two email addresses: one for team members and one for the team’s “blackhole.” analytics-team@khanacademy.org and analytics-blackhole@khanacademy.org. The -team@ address is for emailing all members of the team. The -blackhole@ address is for anything else that has anything to do with analytics. There’re two additional catch-all lists for the entire dev team: dev-team@ and dev-blackhole@. All email to analytics-team@ gets forwarded to analytics-blackhole@, so lookie-loo -blackhole@ subscribers will get updates sent to -team@ automatically.
Here’s why our team now chooses their own salaries - The Logbook by Hanno
Update: for the latest look at how we’re managing self-set salaries, take a look at our Playbook page. 9 months ago, I wrote about how we were switching to a transparent salary formula within the team. That change, in which everyone could see how much everyone else was being paid, and the way that this pay was calculated, was a big step forwards for us, and a big win for transparency and fairness. But now, as we tend to do quite frequently here at Hanno, we think we’ve found an even better way to tackle this tricky problem. It’s time to throw the old way out of the window and embark on another big pivot to the way we tackle building the ‘product’ of Hanno itself. But first, let’s take a look at how the salary formula worked In my last post about salaries, I didn’t actually set out the precise details of how the formula worked. Role: this was intended to allow us to compensate “coaches” in our team higher, and formed the base figure for all salaries. In theory, all looked good!
