Sugar Daddy Capitalism by Peter Fleming

Author:Peter Fleming
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509528196
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2018-11-22T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

The Human … All-Too-Human Workplace

In 2015, the Las Vegas-based online shoe and clothing store Zappos was regularly in the news. To convey what type of culture the firm had, almost every article had a prominent image of an employee in casual dress, relaxing in office space overflowing with personal items. Batman figures. Beach balls. Collages. Surfboards. Teddy bears. Empty Coke cans. Handcrafted posters reading ‘Whose Yo Daddy?’ and ‘No Boys Allowed’.

In contrast to the lifeless office settings we usually associate with big companies, it was clear that Zappos was doing things differently. The enterprise had grown rapidly, with annual sales of more than US$1 billion in the last few years. Then, in 2014, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh read a book called Reinventing Organizations by management consultant Frederic Laloux.1 It completely changed the way Hsieh saw the business.2

Laloux argued that self-organization and flat structures are far superior to the conventional, vertical bureaucracies that have dominated industrial capitalism. Horizontal organizations use self-management rather than a top-down chain of command. That makes them more responsive, agile and empowering to workers because they regulate their own tasks and responsibilities. For Laloux this represents an evolutionary leap forward in how jobs are organized. The reinvented organization is ‘not the pyramid we know. There are no job descriptions, no targets, hardly any budgets. In their place come many new and soulful practices that make for extraordinarily productive and purposeful organizations.’3 Despite these findings, big bureaucracies continue to be the norm, unfortunately, an obstacle to achieving a higher, more human form of social consciousness.

The reason Reinventing Organizations resonated with Hsieh is because he was restructuring Zappos.4 He’d recently informed the company’s 1,500 employees – or Zapponians – that the firm was adopting a system called ‘Holacracy’ (a term derived from Greek: ὅλον, holon or ‘whole’).5 Instead of traditional management hierarchies, Zappos would be made up of circles. These independent units would manage their own workflow, whilst remaining reliant on the organization as a whole (hence the term ‘Holacracy’). There’d be no more bosses, job titles or any of the other red tape connected with bureaucracy. Holacracy is about enabling people to manage themselves, trusting them as capable adults who thrive on flexibility and creativity. In place of static job titles, for example, workers will use a system called ‘badging’, which is more fluid and adaptable to new challenges. After Hsieh’s announcement, workers had to prove their expertise in order to continue in their current roles. This applied to new recruits and veteran Zapponians alike.6

So far, this might look like a weird experiment in anarcho-socialism. But far from it. For Hsieh, the management approach was quintessentially entrepreneurial, taking its inspiration from capitalist individualism and the wonders of private enterprise. If anything, this was an experiment in 100 per cent pure capitalism. In an interview, Hsieh compared Zappos to the real-time supply-and-demand method pioneered by Uber: ‘An Uber driver doesn’t have a shift. They can decide to show up or not show up … we want to apply that same thing to incoming phone calls.

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