Posted on

Meet Valve, the company “managing without managers”

Business Insider has published a small article about Valve a 16-year old company that has no corporate hierarchy whatsoever.

Valve’s basic approach to “managing without managers” is:

  • hire only incredibly self-motivated people
  • give them full autonomy to decide what project to work on
  • teach them to spot valuable projects, and to understand what value they can add to those projects
  • allow team structure to happen organically – teams self-select, leaders are chosen by their peers
  • encourage people to acknowledge and learn from mistakes quickly to move forward
  • make everyone responsible together for the success or failure of projects

and finally (and most critically):

  • determine the value and compensation of each employee by peer review

Read the full article to learn more

Posted on

Peer production and governance, commons and value creation in the collaborative economy

Michel Bauwens is a Peer-to-Peer theorist and an active writer, researcher and conference speaker on the subject of technology, culture and business innovation.

I already talked about Michel Bauwens’s work when discussing the revolution brought by open source and peer production models.

Here is another great video  where Michel explains what are peer-production, peer governance and how people use commons to create more value (the Wikipedia and Linux model). This work and organisation processes are fundamentally different compared to the traditional top-down models and Michel explains the characteristics of this new distributed models. Continue reading “Peer production and governance, commons and value creation in the collaborative economy”

Posted on

McKinsey Report: Social technologies could raise productivity by 20-25%

Guess what ? Email is not really efficient for knowledge management, information sharing and collaboration. Surprising, hum ? Well that’s nothing new for most people collaborating in online communities using blogs, wikis, social networks even though most companies use some kind of social technologies “in some way”, real collaboration is still Terra incognita.

So this report from McKinsey comes handy to convince businesses they really need to change the way they work. In their estimates interaction workers productivity could improve by 20-25%.

Continue reading “McKinsey Report: Social technologies could raise productivity by 20-25%”