Interesting Radio 4 show yesterday (17th March, 2021) about a young entrepreneur who builds the ‘happiest company in the world’, an online shoe retailer so profitable that Amazon snaps it up for over a billion dollars. But what if the company’s profits and happiness could be boosted by a radical reimagining of the workplace?
No more bosses, no more job titles, just creativity, equality and pure joy.
Matthew Syed tells the extraordinary story of Tony Hsieh, a visionary entrepreneur who abandoned social hierarchy in his Las Vegas-based shoe company. Could it be that the secret to happiness lies in making everybody equal?
I thought it was very interesting how people need hierarchy especially in a work place. But it’s how we then encourage and foster creativity and diversity within our working environment that is the key to employee happiness.
The concept of ‘holacracy’ was also fascinating – it’s a method of decentralized management and organizational governance, which claims to distribute authority and decision-making through a holarchy of self-organizing teams rather than being vested in a management hierarchy. Holacracy has been adopted by for-profit and non-profit organizations in several countries.
(Although it turns out people don’t like it that much!!)
