Inside Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh's radical management experiment that prompted 14% of employees to quit

It's a long read:
http://www.businessinsider.com/tony-hsieh-zappos-holacracy-management-experiment-2015-5


On March 24, Zappos' 1,500 or so employees got a memo from CEO Tony Hsieh."This is a long email," it began. "Please take 30 minutes to read through the email in its entirety."It concerned the retailer's transition to "Holacracy," a manager-free operating structure that is composed, in theory, of equally privileged employees working in task-specific circles, often overlapping.

Hsieh began experimenting with Holacracy in 2013 as a way of maintaining Zappos' lauded employee-centric culture as it continued to grow.The transition was supposed to have finished within a year. But by March 2015, only 85% of Zappos employees had begun the process."Having one foot in one world while having the other foot in the other world has slowed down our transformation towards self-management and self-organization," Hsieh wrote.He offered an ultimatum:

Embrace self-management by April 30, or we'll give you a three-month severance package to leave.By May, 210 Zappos employees, or 14% of the company, had taken the offer.What's going on inside the Amazon-owned Zappos? Hsieh is conducting one of the biggest experiments in management history, but one in seven employees didn't want to take part.Hsieh has always proudly kept Zappos weird. But is he at the forefront of a workplace revolution that could shape the future of companies or taking the counterculture approach too far?

Last edited by Common Sense (5/16/2015 12:28 pm)