Chapter 1.

Case 1:
Question-1: What is a holacracy?

Answer:

A holacracy is a system for managing a company where there are no assigned roles and

employees have the flexibility to take on various tasks and move between teams freely.

Question-2: What benefits do you see to an organization where there are no job
titles, no managers, and no hierarchy?

Answer:

Benefits:

• Fast decision making is a result because the decision makers are closest to the value

point where the product/work happens.

• Team members typically have a higher level of engagement because they are involved

in decision making, direction setting, in a word leading.

• Each circle is a team with a charge. They work together to accomplish the mission of

the team.

• Generally it is easier to spot dissonance with team members.

• Another benefit is that is puts more power in the hands of the workers who probably

know the details of the job better than a manager to work more thoroughly and

efficiently.

Question-3: What challenges does a holarctic approach have?

Answer:

• It is hard to adapt from old management model to Holacracy. Especially when it is a

big company (more than 50 people it already makes hard). Zappos (1600 people) for

instance might take 5 years.

 • More resources are required on training and on-boarding. It is not a easy thing to learn.

It is not just different meeting practices, change people’s habits and some basic

assumptions are also needed.

• It might change the organizational culture in way organization doesn’t want. For

example: Organizations that value intuition over reasoning and always work with a lot

of consensus have to drop those traits. Holacracy values reasoning and hates

consensus. It works with consent for a very small sub set of decisions

• It messes with people professional identity, because it means saying good bye to job

titles and makes some perks seems more unjust than ever. So some people during the

transition are bound to have a hard time and leave the company.

• Holacracy doesn’t solve a lot of issues, like bad leadership, failing business models

and low trust. Actually it helps to bring those things in to surface so the organization

can adapt. So in a sense, I might be the last drop that make a company go bust if it

doesn’t have sufficient time and energy to learn Holacracy and make the adjustments.

Question-4: Discuss why you would or would not like to work in an organization like this.

Answer:

I personally would not like to work in an organization like this going to inevitably cause an

uneven distribution of work among coworkers. Another reason is because the lack of leadership

in this program. All the successful businesses today have a structure of hierarchy and I believe

that when there is a group of people working towards a common goal, there needs to be a person

that “takes the reigns” and lead everyone to the end goal.