It’s Bosses, All The Way Down
Conventional thinking about emergent leadership is all wrong.
Nicolai Foss and Peter Klein go after ‘bosslessness’ as ‘one of the biggest new management fads’ in No boss? No thanks. Why managers are more important that ever.:
“Unfortunately, the bossless-company narrative is dead wrong. It misunderstands the nature of management, which isn’t going away, and it is based on questionable evidence. Given these fundamental defects, this narrative is potentially harmful to managers, students and policymakers.”
I plan a critique in depth, this is just a starting point. [Update 2019–02–18: I’ve reconsidered the notion of a more detailed response, and decided my response here is detailed enough for its purpose. However, I do plan a longer treatment of the idea that in the ‘revolutionary’ business, all workers become bosses.]
This is the discussion we need to have, in the transition from normal to emergent (revolutionary) business (see Moving from ‘Normal’ Organizations to ‘Revolutionary’ Organizations). There is a long list of mistaken assertions in this piece, like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs being seen as exemplars of the new way of work, just because of the high-tech nature of their businesses. They aren’t. Also, there is no real discussion of the changing backdrop behind all this: the…
