holacracy

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pages: 436 words: 141,321

Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness by Frederic Laloux, Ken Wilber

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, different worldview, driverless car, Easter island, failed state, fulfillment center, future of work, hiring and firing, holacracy, index card, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kenneth Rogoff, meta-analysis, ocean acidification, pattern recognition, post-industrial society, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, radical decentralization, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, the market place, the scientific method, Tony Hsieh, warehouse automation, zero-sum game

., 72. 47 Zobrist, La belle histoire de FAVI, 318. 48 Bakke, Joy at Work, 101-102. 49 Shari Caudron, “Meditation and Mindfulness at Sounds True,” Workforce, June 2001. 50 Gary Hamel, “First, Let’s Fire All the Managers,” Harvard Business Review, December 2011, http://hbr.org/2011/12/first-lets-fire-all-the-managers, accessed April 11, 2012. 51 Ibid. 52 Brian Robertson, “Dialog: The History of Holacracy,” Holacracy Community of Practice, October 2011, www.holacracy.org/resources, accessed Febuary 24, 2012. 53 Ibid. 54 Brian Robertson, interviewed by Jeff Klein, En*theos Radio, “It’s Just Good Business,” March 9, 2012, 2012, http://www.entheos.com/radio/shows/Its-Just-Good-Business, accessed April 12, 2012 55 This minimum set of practices is captured in a document called “Holacracy Constitution,” which can be downloaded from Holacracy’s web site at www.holacracy.org. 56 In Holacracy’s language, I should use the term “circle” and not team.

CPP believes it has turned this problem into a strength—out of necessity, the staff has turned autodidacticism into an art form, continuously picking up the latest technical skills to remain state-of-the-art. 68 Hamel, “First, Let’s Fire All the Managers.” 69 Ibid. 70 Brian Robertson, “The Irony of Empowerment,” Holacracy Blogs, October 28, 2010, www.holacracy.org/blog, accessed November 2, 2011. 71 Gary Hamel, What Matters Now (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2012), 176-177. Chapter 2.4: Striving for wholeness (general processes) 72 Brian Robertson, “Holacracy: Empowerment Built In,” Holacracy Blogs, January 16, 2013, www.holacracy.org/blog, accessed January 20, 2013. 73 A similar effect is at play in schools where babies are brought into the classroom. Mary Gordon, a Canadian educator, pioneered a program where mothers (or fathers) and their babies come to spend time with a class of children at regular times.

Each system was better than the last, but that didn’t change the impact of “oh my God everything is changing around here continually.”53 In time, from the crazy experimentation was distilled a sophisticated and coherent set of structures and practices that Robertson calls “Holacracy.” When Robertson hired a new management team and exited Ternary Software, he created HolacracyOne, a consulting and training firm dedicated to refining and spreading the practice of Holacracy in organizations. He often uses a computer analogy to explain what Holacracy is about: Think about it as an operating system for an organization. Not a technology, not a piece of software, but a social technology. Your computer has an operating system … [that] controls how communication happens, how power works, how applications share resources and information, the flow of work through that computer.


pages: 252 words: 78,780

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

It’s a good rap, and he’s got it down. Robertson first came up with the ideas behind Holacracy and inflicted them on the employees of a software company he had started. Eventually he came to believe that the management methodology was more interesting than the software company, and he decided that instead of selling code he would make a living by teaching people a new way to run companies. Robertson wrote the “Holacracy Constitution” and in 2015 published a book, Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World. The name holacracy comes from holarchy, a term from a 1967 book, The Ghost in the Machine, by Arthur Koestler, who was trying to figure out how the mind and body are related to each other and posited that humans are composed of things called holons.

Then I say, ‘Okay, now can we address one of my tensions.’” Robertson’s company, HolacracyOne, has twenty employees. Robertson has certified fifty Holacracy trainers who work independently. More than one thousand companies have adopted Holacracy. Small pilot programs are running at Dannon, the yogurt company; Ernst & Young, the consultancy; and Starwood, the hotel chain. Robertson admits that the transition to Holacracy can be painful. When Zappos, the online shoe retailer, insisted in 2015 that employees commit to using Holacracy or leave the company, nearly 30 percent walked out. The ones who remained were so unhappy that Zappos fell off the Fortune magazine “Best Places to Work” list, where for years it had been a top company.

That sends people looking for a new approach to running organizations. Most CEOs have an intuitive sense that there has to be a better way to run a company. They see Holacracy, and they feel drawn to a new paradigm. It’s more dynamic, more lean, more agile.” It sounds great to be lean and agile. But I suspect that most of these ideas are not going to make any company perform any better. Recently I spoke to a CEO whose predecessor had adopted Holacracy. The first thing the new guy did was throw it all out. “Holacracy,” he says, “is the illusion that the natural state of things is reverse entropy. If you just leave things and people alone, they will become more ordered and efficient.


pages: 416 words: 100,130

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You by Jeremy Heimans, Henry Timms

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, battle of ideas, benefit corporation, Benjamin Mako Hill, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, British Empire, Chris Wanstrath, Columbine, Corn Laws, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, game design, gig economy, hiring and firing, holacracy, hustle culture, IKEA effect, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Snapchat, social web, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

BuurtzorgWeb: “Buurtzorg Web,” July 2017. www.buurtzorg.com. “new way of running”: Benjamin Snyder, “Holacracy and 3 of the Most Unusual Management Practices Around,” Fortune, June 2, 2015. “As a Partner assigned”: Holacracy, “Holacracy Constitution,” HolacracyOne, LLC, 2013. www.holacracy.org. “getting in the way of the work”: Aimee Groth, “Zappos Is Struggling with Holacracy Because Humans Aren’t Designed to Operate like Software,” Quartz, December 21, 2016. “It felt like being part of a code”: Julia Culen, “Holacracy: Not Safe Enough to Try,” Medium, June 27, 2015. “During the next year”: Deloitte, “The Future of the Workforce: Critical Drivers and Challenges,” Deloitte, July 2016, 6. https://www2.deloitte.com.

You may do this on a case-by-case basis when others request permission to impact one of your Domains, by considering the request and allowing or withholding permission.” Restrictions and protocols, with a good sprinkle of jargon, become the focus under Holacracy, not the work itself. Medium abandoned Holacracy after initially embracing it with gusto, saying it was “getting in the way of the work,” and Holacracy is partly blamed for the departure of an unprecedented nearly one-third of the Zappos workforce in just one year, 2015, and for the company’s being left off Fortune magazine’s annual list of the best places to work for the first time in eight years. Holacracy is like new power for robots. Julia Culen describes her experience when a long-standing Viennese-based consulting firm of which she was a managing partner adopted Holacracy: “It felt like being part of a code…an algorithm that is optimized for machines, but not for humans.

It boasts more flexible roles for staff and greater transparency. Holacracy might sound a lot like Buurtzorg, only with better software. It is far from it. In fact, the differences between the two models help us understand the real secret to Buurtzorg’s success, and what the rest of us might try to emulate. Nurses like Madelon and her teams have huge freedom to define their own working methods while Holacracy is highly structured and directive, perhaps more so than many old power organizations. A sample instruction from the forty-page Holacracy constitution reads: “As a Partner assigned to a Role, you have the authority to control and regulate each Domain of your Role.


pages: 280 words: 82,355

Extreme Teams: Why Pixar, Netflix, AirBnB, and Other Cutting-Edge Companies Succeed Where Most Fail by Robert Bruce Shaw, James Foster, Brilliance Audio

Airbnb, augmented reality, benefit corporation, Blitzscaling, call centre, cloud computing, data science, deliberate practice, Elon Musk, emotional labour, financial engineering, future of work, holacracy, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Jony Ive, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, loose coupling, meta-analysis, nuclear winter, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Tony Fadell, Tony Hsieh, work culture

Managers who are unwilling to do so are not hired or don’t remain with the firm. A second example of Zappos being an expression of Hsieh’s thinking involves his dislike of hierarchy. He is now implementing a new organizational approach in Zappos with an emphasis on self-managing teams, called holacracy.17 In the simplest terms, holacracy eliminates most of the authority structures found in traditional firms (including titles). This radical approach is designed to create a company of entrepreneurs who identify and seize opportunities as they arise and, in so doing, help the company operate more effectively. Traditional management roles are replaced by governance groups called “circles.”

See Rebecca Keegan, “With ‘Despicable Me 2’ and More, Movies Revisit the Sequel Debate,” Los Angeles Times, July 5, 2013. 16Walt Disney said, “I don’t make movies to make money—I make money to make movies.” Quoted in Hayagreeva Rao, Robert Sutton, and Allen P. Webb, “Innovation Lessons from Pixar: An interview with Oscar-Winning Director Brad Bird,” McKinsey Quarterly, April 2008. 17Steve Denning, “Making Sense of Zappos and Holacracy,” Forbes, January 15, 2014. A more detailed description of the approach can be found at Ethan Bernstein et al., “Beyond the Holacracy Hype,” Harvard Business Review July-August (2016). We will not know for few years if the approach will work at Zappos. My sense is that some elements of it will be retained by the company but it will not survive in its current form due to the complexities of making it work.

The leaders also state that the normal turnover in the firm is about 20 percent (indicating the additional turnover in 2015 was only 10 percent). A second reference suggests that 18 percent of the employee population took the company’s buyout offer in 2015, with 6 percent citing holacracy as the reason they were leaving. See Gregory Ferenstein, “The Zappos Exodus Wasn’t About Holacracy, Says Tony Hsieh,” Fast Company, January 19, 2016. Also see David Gelles, “The Zappos Exodus Continues After a Radical Management Experiment,” New York Times, January 13, 2016. 19See Joseph B. Lassiter and Evan Richardson, “Airbnb,” Harvard Business Review, September 28, 2011.


pages: 292 words: 85,151

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Burning Man, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Wanstrath, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fail fast, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hiring and firing, holacracy, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Internet of things, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, lifelogging, loose coupling, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Max Levchin, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, prediction markets, profit motive, publish or perish, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Holacracy (a concept as well as the company’s name) is defined as a social technology or system of organizational governance, in which authority and decision-making are distributed via fractal, self-organizing teams rather than being vested at the top of a hierarchy. The system combines Experimentation, OKRs, openness, transparency and Autonomy. The following table compares traditional organizational characteristics with autonomous organizations like those advocated by Holacracy: Without Holacracy With Holacracy Central control and authority Distributed control and authority Predict and plan for long term Dynamic and flexible: changes can and are constantly occuring Hierarchic structure OR flat, based on consensus Neither, as everyone is the ‘highest authority’ in their own role and ‘follower’ of other roles Interest oriented Core goal oriented Tension as a problem Tension as fuel Reorganization and change management Natural development, evolution and movement Job titles Dynamic roles Heroic leaders, employees and process supervisors Vital people who fulfill their role Organizing people Organizing work Instrumental use of human relationships to serve Organizational goals Clear separation between people, relationships and roles Holacracy is said to increase agility, efficiency, transparency, innovation and accountability within an organization.

These hypercritical and demanding consumers can only be satisfied with companies placing their most empowered and proactive employees on the front line. A good example of this trend towards Autonomy is a company called Holacracy, which has taken Agile techniques from the software world and the Lean Startup approach and extended them to all aspects of the organization. Holacracy (a concept as well as the company’s name) is defined as a social technology or system of organizational governance, in which authority and decision-making are distributed via fractal, self-organizing teams rather than being vested at the top of a hierarchy.

The following table compares traditional organizational characteristics with autonomous organizations like those advocated by Holacracy: Without Holacracy With Holacracy Central control and authority Distributed control and authority Predict and plan for long term Dynamic and flexible: changes can and are constantly occuring Hierarchic structure OR flat, based on consensus Neither, as everyone is the ‘highest authority’ in their own role and ‘follower’ of other roles Interest oriented Core goal oriented Tension as a problem Tension as fuel Reorganization and change management Natural development, evolution and movement Job titles Dynamic roles Heroic leaders, employees and process supervisors Vital people who fulfill their role Organizing people Organizing work Instrumental use of human relationships to serve Organizational goals Clear separation between people, relationships and roles Holacracy is said to increase agility, efficiency, transparency, innovation and accountability within an organization. The approach encourages individual team members to take initiative and gives them a process by which their concerns or ideas can be addressed. The system of distributed authority also reduces the burden on leaders to make every decision alone.


pages: 326 words: 91,559

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy by Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, back-to-the-land, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, degrowth, disruptive innovation, do-ocracy, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, Fairphone, Food sovereignty, four colour theorem, future of work, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, holacracy, hydraulic fracturing, initial coin offering, intentional community, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Money creation, multi-sided market, Murray Bookchin, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-work, precariat, premature optimization, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TED Talk, transaction costs, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, undersea cable, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

Inspired by such communities, tech-industry consultants promote new management philosophies with such names as Holacracy, Agile, and Teal.6 These feats of dynamic, distributed workflow seem to outstrip the democracy of most big, established cooperatives nowadays, which tend to have carbon-copied their hierarchies from industrial-age bureaucracies. Techie capitalism can appear to be out-cooperating the co-ops. For instance, Holacracy: borrowing a name from Arthur Koestler’s concept of the holon—“a whole that is part of a larger whole”—it proposes to replace the top-down hierarchy of the industrial corporation with the free flow of an open-source project. There is some hierarchy in Holacracy—officially capitalized, a registered trademark of the company HolacracyOne—but, rather than the metaphor of a pyramid, the system relies on nested “circles.”

Rather than a single job description, each worker can hold any number of carefully specified “roles,” within which the worker has authority to make relevant decisions, whether the CEO likes them or not. For bosses used to command-and-control, Holacracy means giving up the power to micromanage. Meetings are short and highly regimented. Rather than mouthing off at will, the people formerly called managers have to trust the process and the code-like rules that define it. The system has been implemented partly or fully in various corners of the tech industry—for instance, at Zappos and Medium—though in investor-oriented settings like these, it has a tendency to implode.7 Maybe the contradictions become too easily apparent. Although Holacracy grants even the lowliest employees autonomy in their domain, that autonomy must always accord with the rules of the game, with the overriding purpose of the company.

Although Holacracy grants even the lowliest employees autonomy in their domain, that autonomy must always accord with the rules of the game, with the overriding purpose of the company. The purpose is everything in Holacracy. And, for most sizable tech companies, that purpose is to furnish wealth for investors. Self-determination gets dangled before people but then yanked away as soon as it might really matter. Despite tech culture’s clever hacks of intellectual-property law and organizational charts, it has left the basic accountability of the firm mostly unscathed—in particular, its ownership structure and its profits. Companies have exhibited some cooperative tendencies in their use of employee stock options to lure talent to early startups, and this has meant windfalls for some, but investor control takes over before long.


pages: 515 words: 126,820

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World by Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business logic, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, decentralized internet, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Google bus, GPS: selective availability, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, money market fund, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, QR code, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, social graph, social intelligence, social software, standardized shipping container, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Nature of the Firm, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, wealth creators, X Prize, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Our story of ConsenSys is not so much about its ambitious blockchain-based products or services. It’s about its efforts to cultivate a company of its own, pioneering important new ground in management science along the lines of holacracy, a collaborative rather than hierarchical process for defining and aligning the work to be done. “While I don’t want us to implement holacracy as is—it feels way too rigid and structured to me—we are working to incorporate many of its philosophies in our structure and processes,” said Lubin. Among those holacratic tenets are “dynamic roles rather than traditional job descriptions; distributed, not delegated authority; transparent rules rather than office politics; and rapid reiterations rather than big reorganizations,” all of which describe how blockchain technologies work.

Edella Schlarger and Elinor Ostrom, “Property-Rights Regimes and Natural Resources: A Conceptual Analysis,” Land Economics 68(3) (August 1992): 249–62; www.jstor.org/stable/3146375. 47. Interview with Haluk Kulin, June 9, 2015. 48. John Paul Titlow, “Fire Your Boss: Holacracy’s Founder on the Flatter Future of Work,” Fast Company, Mansueto Ventures LLC, July 9, 2015; www.fastcompany.com/3048338/the-future-of-work/fire-your-boss-holacracys-founder-on-the-flatter-future-of-work. 49. World Bank, September 2, 2015; www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2015/04/15/massive-drop-in-number-of-unbanked-says-new-report. 50. “Bitcoin Powers New Worldwide Cellphone Top-Up Service,” CoinDesk, February 15, 2015; www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-powers-new-worldwide-cellphone-top-service/, accessed August 26, 2015.

“The blockchain provides us a whole group of people who are both mission-aligned and technology-aligned to create different ways that enterprises can leverage these unique data sets rather than protect their data silos.”47 Simply put, people create better data than what a company can frack from them, and consumers are much better at emotionally aligning with brands and influencing their peers than companies are. Implications for the Blockchain Economy: As an economic design principle, enforcing rights must start with clarifying rights. In the field of management science, the holacracy movement is an interesting, if not controversial, example of how members of organizations are defining the work that needs to be done and then assigning rights and the responsibility to do this work as part of a whole.48 Who did we agree should have this set of decisions and activities at our company?


pages: 309 words: 81,975

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization? by Aaron Dignan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, DevOps, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gender pay gap, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Goodhart's law, Google X / Alphabet X, hiring and firing, hive mind, holacracy, impact investing, income inequality, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loose coupling, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, mirror neurons, new economy, Paul Graham, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, remote working, Richard Thaler, Rochdale Principles, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, six sigma, smart contracts, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, source of truth, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The future is already here, the High Line, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, universal basic income, WeWork, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

It’s a piece of the puzzle, not the whole thing. It is necessary but not sufficient. It turns out agility isn’t an anomaly in this way. Many management innovations have emerged in the last half century, each promising to revolutionize work as we know it. Lean Manufacturing. Total Quality Management. ISO 9000. Six Sigma. Sociocracy. Holacracy. The Lean Startup. The list goes on and on. Each was, in its own way, a piece of an operating system. Some were misguided from the start. Others became perversions of themselves over time. And a few offered real wisdom that is yet to be fully realized. Thich Nhat Hanh wrote in Old Path White Clouds, “A finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.”

Interestingly, in Sociocracy members may consent to using other methods of decision making, including distributing authority to specific roles, teams, or elected representatives, provided they consent to the method itself. The process he developed has been refined over the years by practitioners of Sociocracy and was reintroduced in a more structured form by the creators of Holacracy as Integrative Decision Making or IDM. IDM contains a series of “rounds” that act as an algorithm for processing a proposal. Above all, the method prioritizes inclusion and forward momentum. The final round is the breakthrough: someone who objects to a proposal cannot simply veto it but must try to shape it further to make it safe to try.

One way to do this is to encourage every team to hold a monthly governance meeting. The goal of this meeting is for everyone to have the chance to voice their concerns and propose local changes to structure, strategy, resources . . . anything that will help the organization pursue its purpose. Thousands of organizations around the world that practice Sociocracy, Holacracy, or other forms of participatory governance are doing this today. Imagine every team in your organization continuously and deliberately tweaking, not just your products and services but the organization itself. Meetings in Action Facilitators and Scribes. One of the best ways to increase meeting effectiveness is to ensure that someone is responsible for the structure, flow, and output of every meeting.


pages: 165 words: 50,798

Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything by Peter Morville

A Pattern Language, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, augmented reality, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Black Swan, business process, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Computer Lib, disinformation, disruptive innovation, folksonomy, holacracy, index card, information retrieval, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kanban, Lean Startup, Lyft, messenger bag, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Nelson Mandela, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Project Xanadu, quantum entanglement, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single source of truth, source of truth, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, zero-sum game

There’s more than one way to classify a cat. Once that door of perception is open, we can nudge ourselves and our colleagues towards celebrating both difference and similarity. The org chart is a place to start. Is the hierarchy reinforcing the unhealthy division of disciplines? Might a “holacracy” of self-organizing, multi-disciplinary, cross-functional teams work better?xliv In holacracy, authority and decision-making are distributed, and members can be in more than one circle. Zappos and Medium are giving it a try. Maybe we should too. Once the org chart’s okay, layout is a lever worth a pull. Where we sit relative to our colleagues can unlock creativity and drive collaboration.

xxxix Fundamentals of Language by Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle (1956), p.60. xl Semiotics: The Basics by Daniel Chandler (2002), p.111. xli Conversion, Culture, and Cognitive Categories by Paul G. Hiebert (1978). xlii Centered and Bounded Sets by Dan Klyn (2012). xliii Life of Pi by Yann Martel (2003), p.66. xliv To learn more about holacracy, see holacracy.org. xlv The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs (1961), p.392. xlvi The New Library Patron by Lee Rainie (2013). xlvii The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander (1979). xlviii The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth by Christopher Alexander, Hans Joachim Neis, and Maggie Moore Alexander (2012), p.115.


Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow by Matthew Skelton, Manuel Pais

anti-pattern, business logic, business process, call centre, cognitive load, continuous integration, Conway's law, database schema, DevOps, different worldview, Dunbar number, holacracy, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kanban, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kubernetes, Lean Startup, loose coupling, meta-analysis, microservices, Norbert Wiener, operational security, platform as a service, pull request, remote working, systems thinking, two-pizza team, web application

“The Dunbar Number, From the Guru of Social Networks.” Bloomberg.com, January 11, 2013. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-01-10/the-dunbar-number-from-the-guru-of-social-networks. Bernstein, Ethan, John Bunch, Niko Canner, and Michael Lee. “Beyond the Holacracy Hype.” Harvard Business Review, July 1, 2016. https://hbr.org/2016/07/beyond-the-holacracy-hype. Bernstein, Ethan, Jesse Shore, and David Lazer. “How Intermittent Breaks in Interaction Improve Collective Intelligence.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115 no. 35 (August, 2018): 8734–8739. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1802407115.

Niels Pflaeging, author of Organize for Complexity, identifies not one but three different organizational structures in every organization:2 Formal structure (the org chart)—facilitates compliance Informal structure—the “realm of influence” between individuals Value creation structure—how work actually gets done based on inter-personal and inter-team reputation Pflaeging suggests that the key to successful knowledge work organizations is in the interactions between the informal structure and the value creation structure (that is, the interactions between people and teams).3 Other authors have proposed similar characterizations, such as Frédéric Laloux in Reinventing Organizations or Brian Robertson’s Holacracy approach.4 The Team Topologies approach acknowledges the importance of informal and value creation structures as defined by Pflaeging. By empowering teams, and treating them as fundamental building blocks, individuals inside those teams move closer together to act as a team rather than just a group of people.


Rethinking Money: How New Currencies Turn Scarcity Into Prosperity by Bernard Lietaer, Jacqui Dunne

3D printing, 90 percent rule, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, clockwork universe, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, conceptual framework, credit crunch, different worldview, discounted cash flows, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, liberation theology, low interest rates, Marshall McLuhan, microcredit, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, Occupy movement, price stability, reserve currency, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, urban decay, War on Poverty, working poor

One can be a lowly farmer toiling on the lands of the Ngong Hill in Kenya or be pushing a broom in some sweatshop in Shanghai, have Governance and We, the Citizens 191 little or no formal education, and be truly wise. The corollary to that also stands. A modern governance system, although very different, reflecting the fractal nature of the Balinese system, is holacracy. Its structure and procedures integrate the collective wisdom of people while aligning a venture, network, or business with its “broader purpose and a more organic way of operating and the result is dramatically increased agility, transparency, innovation, and accountability.”10 DEMOCRACY, TRANSPARENCY, AND ACCOUNTABILITY The key aspects of the Balinese cooperative currency system— democratic governance, transparency, and accountability—are clearly necessary conditions for a cooperative currency to succeed over time.

Other types of trading coins and brass gongs have been discovered in Bali, some of which originate from the Dong Son culture of Vietnam in the 4th century ad. 6. Stephen DeMeulenaere, interview with Jacqui Dunne, January 2, 2012. 7. Ibid. 238 NOTES 8. Hildred Geertz and Clifford Geertz, Kinship in Bali (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). 9. DeMeulenaere, interview, December 2, 2011. 10. See www.holacracy.com. 11. Margrit Kennedy, interview with Jacqui Dunne, June 1, 2012. 12. See www.regiogeld.de. 13. Dee Hock, One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization (San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler, 2005). 14. John Boik, interview with Jacqui Dunne, May 30, 2012. 15. John Boik, “Creating Sustainable Societies: The Rebirth of Democracy and Local Economies,” 2012. www.creatingsustainablesocieties.com. 16.

See Trash Garden, 151, 161 Geuro, 149 GI Bill, 153 Gift, 47– 49, 82 Glass-Steagall Act, 69–70 Globalization, 86, 221 Global Trading Network, 182–183 Golden ghetto, 19 Gold standard, 24–26; Free Lakota Bank and, 113; homogeneity and, 65– 66; as reference currency, 140; Terra and, 135; in Utah, 201; in Weimar Republic, 236n10 INDEX Goodwill: in Friendly Favors, 132–133; TimeBank and, 82 Google, 200 Google Wallet, 115–116 Government Accountability Office (GAO), 170–171 Government debt, 42– 43, 70, 145–147, 227n21 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, 70 Great Depression, 24, 175, 180–181; GDP and, 35; GNP and, 33– 34; WIR and, 99, 102 Greece, 149 Greed, 4 Green products, 152, 186 Greenwashing, 198 Gross domestic product (GDP), 34– 35, 131, 146 Gross National Happiness, 131 Gross national product (GNP), 33– 35 Growth pressure, 2, 42– 43, 52– 53 Happy Futures Global Challenge, 131 Hate group, 182 Health care, 14, 16; free clinic, 162–165; in Mae Hong Son, 205 Helplessness, 17 High-powered money, 40 Hitler, Adolf, 180, 236n10 Holacracy, 191 Homogeneity, 65– 66, 86 Honey, 130–131 HOURS, 162–165, 163 Housing: buying, 110–111, 142–143; improvised, 141 Hubbee, 130–131 Hub Network, 130–131 Human construct, 2, 13, 217 Human right, 49 Human Right, A, 165–166 Hyperinflation, 70, 176, 178–179 ICCO, 105 Identity, 19 Immediacy. See Short-termism Immigration, 156 Income, 51, 108 255 Industrial Age, 2, 15, 203; Information Age and, 120; Third Industrial Revolution, 218; values, 28 Inflation, 91– 93; of creditos, 184–185; hyperinflation, 70, 176, 178–179 Information Age, 50, 120, 201 Infrastructure, 15, 20–21, 103, 194 Inheritance, 18 Innernet, 223 InspirePay, 116 Instability, 134 Insurance, 114, 121–122, 216 Interconnectivity, 32, 62 Interest, 37– 42; bankruptcy and, 39, 41; competition and, 37– 40; compound, 42– 43; JAK and, 110; regio and, 191; scarcity and, 37– 40; short-termism and, 45– 46, 52– 53, 85– 86; wealth transfer via, 49– 50; WIR and, 99–100 Intergenerational thinking, 44 Intern, 16–17, 120 International Architecture Exhibition, 85 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 144, 182, 184 International reserve currency, 57– 58 Internet: community, 57– 58; technologies, 115–116.


pages: 1,172 words: 114,305

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

You only create incentives for the boss to replace you with software. Electricity and replacement parts are a lot cheaper than food and medicine. Advances in software and robotics have been so rapid that they even raise questions about the replaceability of bosses themselves. Zappos has experimented with “holacracy,” a flat-management style that leaves workers to self-organize their tasks.97 The Harvard Business Review has repeatedly celebrated the “automation of management.”98 Apps like Uber’s delegate management to a code layer, which connects riders with drivers. Bad drivers are no longer fired but “deactivated” by an algorithmic scoring tool.99 Perhaps higher-level executives could find their own work ranked, rated, and ultimately completed by AI.

Ernesto Caivano, Settlements, Selected Works 2002–2013 (New York: Pioneer Works Gallery, 2013). 94. David Edward, Artscience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 95. Ernesto Caivano, Settlements, 40–53. 96. Hartmut Rosa, The Social Acceleration of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). 97. Brian J. Robertson, Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World (New York: Holt, 2015). 98. Katherine Barr, “AI Is Getting Good Enough to Delegate the Work It Can’t Do,” Harvard Business Review, May 12, 2015, https://hbr.org/2015/05/ai-is-getting-good-enough-to-delegate-the-work-it-cant-do. 99. Alex Rosenblat and Luke Stark, “Algorithmic Labor and Information Asymmetries: A Case Study of Uber’s Drivers,” International Journal of Communication 10 (2016): 3758–3784; but see also Alison Griswold, “Uber Drivers Fired in New York Can Now Appeal Before a Panel of Their Peers,” Quartz, November 23, 2016, https://qz.com/843967/uber-drivers-fired-in-new-york-can-now-appeal-before-a-panel-of-their-peers/. 100.


pages: 237 words: 67,154

Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet by Trebor Scholz, Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business logic, capital controls, circular economy, citizen journalism, collaborative economy, collaborative editing, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, decentralized internet, deskilling, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, emotional labour, end-to-end encryption, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, food desert, future of work, gig economy, Google bus, hiring and firing, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post-work, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, remunicipalization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rochdale Principles, SETI@home, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Members’ voices are easily lost if they are primarily expressed through the election of a board that meets infrequently and is not very tuned in to the day-to-day work. In a staff trusteeship cooperative, every staff person becomes a point of accountability for the organization, taking on responsibility to listen to and amplify the voices of its members. Staff self-manage using an internal governance and operational model such as Holacracy or sociocracy, which distribute power among staff, removing inefficient hierarchies and ensuring a great deal of agency for each staff member. In a staff trusteeship cooperative, the board of directors is still elected, but it takes on a role that is more akin to that of a guardian, overseeing the activities of the organization and ensuring that the staff are tuning in to members in every possible way.


pages: 218 words: 68,648

Confessions of a Crypto Millionaire: My Unlikely Escape From Corporate America by Dan Conway

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, bank run, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, buy and hold, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, financial independence, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, Haight Ashbury, high net worth, holacracy, imposter syndrome, independent contractor, initial coin offering, job satisfaction, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, rent control, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, smart contracts, Steve Jobs, supercomputer in your pocket, tech billionaire, tech bro, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing complete, Uber for X, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Vitalik Buterin

There in the distance, talking to a crowd of Chinese provincial bureaucrats, was a kindred spirit and one of my heroes, Andrew Keys, the chief evangelist of ConsenSys in Brooklyn. I’d heard him interviewed on a bunch of podcasts. I was a big fan of his company. For an ETH freak like me, ConsenSys was the hippest, edgiest, most profoundly cool company in the world. They called themselves an Ethereum Production Studio, and they ran the company as a holacracy, meaning it was structured as a flat organization, unlike a traditional corporation. Its founder, Joseph Lubin, was an early disciple of Ethereum and a mentor to Vitalik on the business side. He was a co-founder who helped Vitalik get the word out and attract developers to Ethereum after it launched in 2015.


pages: 361 words: 81,068

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

But, like Google, Amazon is also massively investing in automated labor technology, with Jeff Bezos telling his investors in May 2014 that he expected to be using 10,000 robots in its fulfillment centers by the beginning of 2015.34 Thus in 2012 Amazon paid $775 million for Kiva Systems, a maker of robots for servicing warehouses. Kiva robots—which, by the way, are already being used by the Amazon-owned online shoe store Zappos (in Zappos’s hierarchy-free holacracy, all robots are presumably equal)—can retrieve and pick 200–400 items an hour. As George Packer warns in a 2014 New Yorker piece, “Amazon’s warehouse jobs are gradually being taken over by robots.” The chilling end result, Packer forecasts, is that Amazon will have “eliminated the human factor from shopping, and we will finally be all alone with our purchases.”35 The Everything Store is, in truth, turning out to be the nobody store.


pages: 304 words: 80,143

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines by William Davidow, Michael Malone

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, holacracy, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, license plate recognition, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, QWERTY keyboard, ransomware, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, Snapchat, speech recognition, streetcar suburb, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, trade route, Turing test, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, zero day, zero-sum game, Zipcar

,” Slate, November 14, 2013, http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2013/11/14/facebook_s_1_billion_instagram_buy_did_kevin_systrom_sell_too_soon.html (accessed June 27, 2019). 66. Adam Lashinsky, “Why Amazon Tolerates Zappos’ Extreme Management Experiment,” Fortune, March 4, 2016, https://fortune.com/2016/03/04/amazon-zappos-holacracy/; and Andrew Ross Sorkin and Jeremy W. Peters, “Google to Acquire YouTube for $1.65 Billion,” New York Times, October 9, 2006, https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/09/business/09cnd-deal.html. 67. Ben Casselman, “A Start-Up Slump Is a Drag on the Economy. Big Business May Be to Blame,” New York Times, September 20, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/20/business/economy/startup-business.html?


pages: 239 words: 80,319

Lurking: How a Person Became a User by Joanne McNeil

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Rubin, benefit corporation, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Chris Wanstrath, citation needed, cloud computing, context collapse, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, decentralized internet, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, eternal september, fake news, feminist movement, Firefox, gentrification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, green new deal, helicopter parent, holacracy, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julie Ann Horvath, Kim Stanley Robinson, l'esprit de l'escalier, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Mondo 2000, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, pre–internet, profit motive, Project Xanadu, QAnon, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing complete, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, web application, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, you are the product

TechCrunch, ordinarily a Silicon Valley cheerleading rag, and seldom one to rock the boat, published a remarkably sympathetic piece documenting the abuse she experienced at the company, concluding that the “situation has greater import than a single person’s struggle: Horvath’s story is a tale of what many underrepresented groups feel and experience in the tech sector.” The story of Horvath’s exit had a long media cycle, including coverage in publications rarely concerned with Silicon Valley or its products at the time. Readers outside the tech industry learned about GitHub’s bizarre policy of “holacracy,” the so-called decentralized management structure that is a clusterfuck in practice, where no one is responsible for anything and everyone is responsible for everything. Few reporters could resist a jab at GitHub HQ’s replica of the White House Oval Office, complete with a circular carpet emblazoned with the words “The United Meritocracy of GitHub” (the company’s gift to itself after a one-hundred-million-dollar investment from Andreessen Horowitz).


pages: 506 words: 151,753

The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze by Laura Shin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Airbnb, altcoin, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, cloud computing, complexity theory, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, DevOps, digital nomad, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial independence, Firefox, general-purpose programming language, gravity well, hacker house, Hacker News, holacracy, independent contractor, initial coin offering, Internet of things, invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, litecoin, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, off-the-grid, performance metric, Potemkin village, prediction markets, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, social distancing, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Turing complete, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks

Sam denies there was a company shaman, though in 2018 she signed up for a developer technology event in New York with ConsenSys as her affiliation. In June 2019, she was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer and died in March 2020.) Joe and the senior managers had eschewed a hierarchy, instead promoting a decentralized holacracy (dubbed within ConsenSys as a “meshocracy”), in which people would “self-organize” efficiently.30 One staffer concluded this was a euphemism for anarchy. Another team lead recalled how Human Resources would ask him to review people on his team, and half of them would be people who had left ConsenSys two years prior.