Which Job Would You Take?
Imagine you are looking for a new job. You have received two offers, both for the same salary and comparable benefits. You need to decide which job to accept.
The first offer is from a well-established firm with a long history of profitability. Like the typical company, it is organized as a top-down hierarchy comprised of many departments. You will be working in one of those departments and reporting to a boss who will have command-and-control authority over you. Although you may have opportunity for input, once decisions are made by your superiors, you will not be allowed to challenge the authority of the decision-makers. That’s because the organizational design principle of top-down hierarchies is trust authority. Accordingly, you will be expected to do what you are told, following the directions of your boss, whether you agree with them or not. Challenging authority or failure to follow directions could be cause for termination.
The second company is a highly successful enterprise, also with decades of consistent profitability. However, this company is organized very differently. It’s not a top-down hierarchy; it’s a peer-to-peer network. And its organizational decision principle is nobody is smarter than everybody. Rather than working in a departmental silo, you would be part of a cross functional team of between seven to twelve people. No one would be in charge of this team because, unlike the first company, there are no bosses in peer-to-peer networks. Instead, each team is responsible for making decisions as a group. Team members are free to challenge anyone else’s thinking and are expected to consider the input of all voices in reaching their decisions. Once the team agrees on a course of action and team members commit to what each will do to support the action, everyone is expected to keep their commitments.
Which job would you take? Chances are you would choose the second company where you wouldn’t be treated like a child and your voice would be heard. However, you are probably thinking that, while the second company may sound like a wonderful place to work, there’s no way you would ever have this opportunity because the peer-to-peer network model is unrealistic. After all, how would anything get done if no one is in charge? Wouldn’t a company like this devolve into chaos?
You might be surprised to learn that there are several successful companies that have been around for decades and have used the peer-to-peer network model to build great organizations. Three of these companies are highlighted in my new book, Nobody Is Smarter Than Everybody: Why Self-Managed Teams Make Better Decisions and Deliver
Extraordinary Results. In addition, the book outlines how several innovative leaders inside traditional organizations have used the principles and practices of peer-to-peer networks to achieve remarkable results. In a rapidly changing world where companies need to change as fast as the world around them, the top-down hierarchy is an idea whose time has passed. The peer-to-peer network is the future of management.