The Zappos Holacracy Experiment

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 29 July 2016

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ethan Bernstein, Harvard Business School professor, and John Bunch, holacracy implementation lead at Zappos, discuss the online retailer's transition to a flat, self-managed organization. They are the coauthors of the HBR article "Beyond the Holacracy Hype."

Transcript

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0:00.0	When leadership advice feels like buzzwords and platitudes, it's time to get real.
0:05.9	HPR's podcast Coaching Real Leaders brings you behind closed doors as Muriel Wilkins coaches anonymous
0:11.9	leaders through raw honest career questions
0:14.6	that we all face.
0:15.9	Listen and follow coaching real leaders for free
0:18.3	wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBR Idea Cast from Harvard Business Review.
0:33.4	I'm Kirtnickish.
0:35.2	Admit it, bosses are the best.
0:38.0	Even when we don't enjoy taking orders from someone,
0:41.3	there's something so comforting about having a supervisor.
0:44.6	There's a safety in knowing there's somebody whose job it is to go to bat for us, to develop
0:49.8	us, to shield us, and when they fall short, or when we do in our work, it's easy to blame them.
0:58.4	Blaming the Boss is no longer possible at Zappos, the Las Vegas online shoe and apparel company is undergoing a bold experiment
1:06.5	to topple classic organizational hierarchy. Today on HBR idea castocracy, and here to talk about this new form of the self-managed
1:16.0	organization is John Bunch, the Holocracy Implementation Lead at Zappos.
1:21.0	John, welcome.
1:22.0	Thanks for having me.
1:23.0	And sitting next to him is Ethan Bernstein, assistant professor of leadership and
1:27.5	organizational behavior at Harvard Business School.
1:30.2	Ethan, thanks for talking with the HBR idea cast.
1:33.7	Thanks, Kurt, it's great to be here.
1:35.3	John and Ethan are both co-authors of a new article
	...

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