Will Holacracy Be The Death of Innovation and Path to Soft-Communism? - Analysis Based on Valve Corporation, Philosophy of Steve Jobs and Praxeology

in #analysis5 years ago

When I first read about Holacracy, the first thing I thought of was Bitcoin community. It's not a perfect 1:1 analogy but I think it is a good one. Holacracy seems like a something born as a reaction than a movement of its own. Holacracy is like the death of bureaucracy. That alone is a great point. But take a step back and look at USD vs BTC. There is still many reasons why USD is the king.

It sounds typical Silicon Valley "Change The World" exciting feel good stuff with good enough fundamentals to deliver part of its promises. It also reminds me of Open-Source software development.

It's sold as "The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World" and I can assure you that it is not changing the world that much. Zappos is the largest company that has implemented Holacracy and they are just doing fine AFAIK. "Fine" isn't that remarkable.

Is Holacracy The Future of Work or A Management Cult?

The title links to a lengthy article. There is actually https://www.holacracy.org website where you can learn about their workshops/training events and everything related. The name "Holacracy " is a registered trademark of HolacracyOne LLC.Selling products and services under the "Holacracy" name requires explicit approval from HolacracyOne. It is not a patent, and does not limit anyone from using the model. It only limits the use of the brand name for commercial purposes.

When "Empowered" Mean Nothing

There is a whole lot of talk but can you name something that was missed during these descriptions? I'll give you a hint and move on for a while.

Think About Human Action and Transcendence.

There are lots of great things regarding the Holacracy approach. But when everybody is unique; nobody is. If you take a look at Valve Corporation, it has been running a a flat organization structure. It's not Holacracy but it has a lot of common ground and I even think that Holacracy is just re-packaged and more complicated flat organization structure. Valve Corporation can actually reveal both the strengths and weaknesses of such a system.

So why did Valve abandon its extremely profitable and critically-acclaimed franchise? Much of the answer has to do with Valve’s unique economic organization, which ultimately undermined efforts to get new games off the ground. I’ve previously written about it in more detail (here), and for those interested, there’s also a fascinating symposium on Valve in the Journal of Organization Design. Basically, Valve uses a “flat” form of business structure with little or no hierarchy. There are no job titles, and employees are not assigned tasks by managers; instead, they decide for themselves what projects they want to work on, and then try to convince others with similar interests to form groups and teams to take their ideas forward.

The basic problem is a lack of good entrepreneurial judgment and practical management. Entrepreneurs act as a locus of control and decision making within firms. Contrary to popular belief, this doesn’t always mean playing an active role in the everyday running of the business—an important part of entrepreneurship is making major decisions while also knowing when to delegate tasks to managers, who determine how best to reach company goals efficiently. Management doesn’t necessarily mean specific direction or monitoring of employees: managers also play more general, coordinating roles that support the work of employees. Ultimately, the kind of goods and services firms produce depend a lot on whether entrepreneurs are willing to trust managers.

In the case of Valve, the main entrepreneur is CEO Gabe Newell. Newell does not seem to have taken the lead by making the decision to move ahead with more Half-Life games. Instead, any decisions about potential projects were left to Valve’s “democratized,” manager-less organization. Without a “driving force” behind their development, new games never materialized.
Source

You can also check out this article titled Searching For Half-Life 3 for more in-depth look. If you read through it with historical knowledge on Bitcoin, you'll see many parallels. Since 2014 the crypto-sphere has been moving forward and innovating with projects like Dash, DPoS, Zero-Knowledge Proof Based Privacy Tech etc. Bitcoin has only enhanced the existing product. Valve has been doing less and less innovation and the only reason they are making big bucks is because the well maintained and popular Steam which is practically Google Search of digital distribution of video games for PC.

The Threat of Soft Communism

There are many Anarcho-Capitalists on STEEM and there are also many who are not 100% Ancaps but support the movement. But in the general Anarchism, Ancaps are called a bunch of hijackers who came in late and adopted the term "Anarchy" while defiling the original meaning. The term was originally used to mean various forms of Anarcho-communism which mostly use Black & Red Colors instead of the familiar Black & Yellow.

Holacracy treads pretty close to Anarcho-communist ideas. We already have most millennials having favorable views towards socialism. It's easy to sell these flat structures to these young crowds who want to feel empowered. They also tend to talk a lot about Scandinavian countries. But Valve, Scandinavia and Holacracy have one important thing missing related to "Human Action and Transcendence"


Now tell me 10 groundbreaking innovations coming from Scandinavia after their soft-communism/welfare capitalism/leeching on free markets. Holacracy is also not too far from the methods implemented in many of the Scandinavian countries and some other European countries. Without entrepreneurship, things can be maintained but not transcended. Holacracy is a great way to kill innovation and progress of the world while catering to communist ideals. A Medium Corporation used to have a Holacracy until 2016 and then they changed. The company itself is massively unprofitable.

Why Open-Source Worked

I mentioned open-source software early in the article. We use open-source software a lot in our daily lives. But except for cryptocurrency projects and privacy obsessed projects like TAILS, these software aren't really innovating but simply improving on something already established. Everybody needs what features would be great for a media player or a browser. There is a general consensus regarding that. When everyone is on the same page, things can work out the same way Steam store worked for Valve Corporation.

Cryptocurrency development kicked off due to financial incentives and we still have start developers like Leemon Baird, Ohad Asor, Vitalik Buterin, @dan @stan JL777 Satoshi Nakamoto etc. We also have goal in mind to achieve. So crypto development is bit of an oddity in open source development.

Chinese Authoritarian/State-Capitalism

If you take a look at any developed Chinese city and any communist city, you'll realize that China is not really communist. The Scandinavians let capitalism run amok so that they can leech off capitalism at massive tax rates. China on the other hand colluded with businesses to keep control in ways that resemble old feudal times of China. With authoritarianism, hierarchy and obsessive efficiency, even their centrally guided economy can fight against western companies. You don't have to look further than WeChat.

You can have a smartphone that only has the WeChat app and live a comfortable life without much inconvenience. It's basically an omni-app.

China is also pushing a lot on non-currency blockchain technology (they hate to see blockchain based currency) and they have started investing heavily into technology. Here is another bit of info:





Source: http://www.visualcapitalist.com

If rest of the world does not innovate, we could be seeing a future where NSA look like the respectful little brother. Systems such as Holacracy is like Democracy (and Holacracy does put a lot of emphasis on community voting and micro level vision in place of macro level vision - The exact opposite of what Steve Jobs described about) and there are use cases for Holacracy just as there are many arguments for charity, I myself have supported many charities both on STEEM, @fundition and in real life. But I'm against making charity into the primary goal of society.

Bureaucracy is a terrible thing. I see the potential of Holacracy being accepted as the alternative by many young people. That would be like accepting Trump because he is not Hillary.

Here's how the 'self-management' system that Zappos is using actually works

The above article describe this new system in action and I don't see a reason to not call it theatrical. There is no room for entrepreneurship which is a cornerstone of Praxeology based Austrian Economics and the works of Ludwig von Mises. We are basically having soft-communism injected into the workplace in name of the good intention of killing bureaucracy.

Be Careful About What You Invite To Workplace - The Biggest Obstacle To Become Great is Being Good

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But in the general Anarchism, Ancaps are called a bunch of hijackers who came in late and adopted the term "Anarchy" while defiling the original meaning. The term was originally used to mean various forms of Anarcho-communism.

I always have to suppress a laugh when I see Anarchists saying communism is the worst, since Anarchy is just a fall-out of communism with less morals. (Same is even more true for the voluntaryists.)

Now tell me 10 groundbreaking innovations coming from Scandinavia after their soft-communism/welfare capitalism/leeching on free markets.

Well, the leeching off free markets seems to work great. Minimum wage is higher than in the US (most capitalistic 1st world country), as is the number of millionaires per capita and the % of people who advance from lowest income quarter to highest income quarter.

As far as innovation goes:
Sweden alone invented the pacemaker, the adjustable wrench, the Tetra Pack and the three point seat belt and the zipper.
Too old?
How about skype? Or a new HIV detection method?

Also, in related news, "communistic" China has just overtaken the USA in the numbers of scientific articles.

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