{"id":11756,"date":"2014-01-14T07:40:28","date_gmt":"2014-01-14T07:40:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beyondphilosophy.com\/?p=11756"},"modified":"2019-09-24T08:42:50","modified_gmt":"2019-09-24T12:42:50","slug":"new-zomm-zappos-organizational-management-model-might-mean-employees-might-mean-customers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/beyondphilosophy.com\/new-zomm-zappos-organizational-management-model-might-mean-employees-might-mean-customers\/","title":{"rendered":"The New ZOMM (Zappos Organizational Management Model)"},"content":{"rendered":"

What Might It Mean for Their Employees? What Might It Mean for Their Customers?<\/h3>\n

Actually, the organizational management model recently announced by Zappos should more accurately be labeled \u201cNon-Management\u201d.\u00a0 It\u2019s a system called Holacracy, specifically designed to yield a less hierarchical, supervisor-free structure.\u00a0 Designed by a consultant named Brian Robertson, a former software company founder, it eliminates formal job and function titles, supervisors and managers, and traditional enterprise levels.\u00a0 What the holacracy organizational model features is a series of overlapping \u2018circles\u2019, where employees are likely to have several different roles.\u00a0 This is reflected in the system\u2019s ancient Greek root, the word \u2018holon\u2019, which means an entity that\u2019s part of a greater whole.\u00a0 A little abstract, perhaps, but you get the idea.<\/p>\n

Why was holacracy adopted at Zappos?\u00a0 Well, to begin, CEO Tony Hsieh has a history of, and is on record as, disliking traditional organizational models, feeling that they are restrictive to both efficiency and individual interaction.\u00a0 So, with holacracy, a key objective will be to increase the level of accountability and involvement, where each employee is responsible to all co-workers rather than a single supervisor or manager.\u00a0 Instead, there will be individuals known as \u2018lead links\u2019, who can assign employees to roles, or remove them, but do not actually tell people what to do. Decisions about role responsibilities and how teams function are made by a \u2018governing process\u2019 by people in each circle.\u00a0 As noted by a Zappos senior executive, the model will also have leaders who \u201chold a bigger scope of purpose for the company\u201d, likely meaning that there will be individuals who have broader functional management roles.<\/p>\n

Sound complicated?\u00a0 A core precept of holacracy is to enable the emergence of leaders who will take charge, rather than build leadership and promote from traditional management hierarchies.\u00a0 Academics who\u2019ve investigated holacracy believe that, potentially, the model can remove internal competition and politics, and create situations where clear decision authority is identified.\u00a0 Zappos has had 10% of its employees on the new system for about eight months, and executives anticipate that the remainder of staff will transition by the end of 2014, with another six months for everyone to understand, and adjust to, its complexities.<\/p>\n

Management approaches have been studied, and applied within all types of enterprise, for hundreds of years.\u00a0 Holacracy is the latest organizational model, the most current response to changing societies, forms of communication and daily life, and economies; but, it\u2019s more of an iterative, or evolutionary, change rather than a revolutionary one.\u00a0 Before holacracy came matrix and lattice models.<\/p>\n

Matrix organizations divide authority by functional area and\/or by project.\u00a0 It has a traditional hierarchy in that each employee is responsible to two supervisors, one functional, such as marketing or IT, and one project-based.\u00a0 Companies have identified several operational and internal relationship advantages to matrix structures:<\/p>\n