Let's dismiss all managers first!

Management brings a minimum to effective work in your organization.

Thinking of countless development managers, department heads, deputy presidents whose job it is to see how others work. Most managers really work a lot - but the real problem is not in them. The main problem arises from the model, where there is a top management, which is both cumbersome and expensive.

Maintaining the entire hierarchy of managers is given a great price for the company. This price consists of the following components:

First, the management imposes additional overhead costs and with the growth of the organization, these costs grow, both in absolute and in relative numbers. For example, if a small organization has 1 manager for 10 employees, then a large one with 100,000 employees, with the same proportion, will have 11,111 managers. Moreover, additional 1,111 managers are needed to manage the managers themselves. In addition, hundreds of employees in management will be added to perform the following functions: finance, resource management, and planning. Their job is to prevent the company from falling apart under its own weight. If we assume that each manager earns three times more than an ordinary employee, then it turns out that 33% of the payroll is managed. You will not be able to reduce it, because managers are very expensive.
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Secondly, the greater the hierarchy in the management system, the higher the risk of making catastrophic decisions. How this happens is the opinion of the manager in matters where he is not competent is valued higher than the directly executor. Self-confidence, myopia and incompetence can lead to bad decisions at any level, but the danger is precisely the very top level, with great power, whose solutions are indisputable. Give anyone the power, like a monarch, and sooner or later she will ruin him. Similar problems arise with the most influential managers who are very far from reality and do not know what is really going on. Very often, decisions made at the top of Olympus are not viable on earth.

Third, the more layers in a multi-level control system, the lower its efficiency. In their quest for power, managers hinder more than speed up the decision-making process. While increasing the costs of the company. In a hierarchical system, the power to accept or reject a new idea depends only on one person who can act in their own interests, and not in the interests of the company.

And finally, what is the price of such tyranny. The main problem is not that management is not correct, but the reason for the management system itself, where ordinary employees, for frequent, do not have the right to vote. For example, as a buyer you can decide how to spend $ 20,000 or more to buy a new car for yourself, and as an employee you do not have the necessary authority to request an office chair for $ 500. By reducing employee empowerment, you reduce his incentives for dreams, imagination and the ability to contribute to the common cause.

Hierarchy vs. Market

Not surprisingly, economists have long noted the ability of the market to coordinate human activity with little or no control from above. Although the market also has its limitations. Economists such as Ronald Coase and Oliver Williamson pointed out that the market works well where every need of its participants is simple, constant and easily defined, but less effective where complex interaction is required. It is difficult to imagine how the market will precisely coordinate the process of a huge number of actions in the center of a gigantic, interdependent production operation.

And yet, why do we need corporations and managers. Managers can not work in the market. They can combine thousands of scattered works into one single product or service. They represent what business historian Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. (Alfred D. Chandler Jr.) calls the visible hand. On the other hand, this visible hand is often ineffective and clumsy.

Agree, it would be just great if we could achieve a high level of coordination, without top management? And how wonderful it would be if we had freedom and flexibility like in the market, while possessing a high degree of coordination, as with a large hierarchy? If only we could manage without managers.

From the author of the translation: It seems to me that control without control is more than possible. At the same time, this should come from the most important person in the company, who will be ready to distribute all his power from himself to his subordinates. And it will not look like weakness - it will be even greater strength. I already know such examples in the Russian market, but I will not do advertising.

After reading the comments, I came to the following thought: you can’t do without managers at all if you already have a company and a distribution by type of work. And here evil is not so much in the structure as such, but in the fact that there are not effective managers. That there is a delusion that everyone can be a manager and a good manager can steer by any process.

I am for everyone to be a professional in his workplace, then the manager will help the developers and the developer to the managers. And the hierarchy should be determined by the size of the projects and levels of responsibility, and each employee should have the right to vote and be responsible for it.

And in my opinion, you can apply the market approach and hierarchy at the same time, but you have to do it skillfully. Just like a programming language, a framework, or just an OOP, does not in itself solve the problems of bydlocoding and can do even more harm in inexperienced hands.

PS: I am writing from my own experience, as a developer, as well as a lower and middle level manager (the Internet project development department was created from scratch)