Radically flat. That’s the management goal that Tony Hseih, founder of e-commerce giant Zappos, aims to achieve by the end of 2014. To get there, Hsieh plans to toss out the traditional corporate hierarchy by eliminating titles among his 1,500 employees that can lead to bottlenecks in decision-making. The end result: a holacracy centered around self-organizing teams who actively push the entire business forward.

There are reasons to think the experiment might work at Zappos, writes Harrison Monarth in the HBR Blog Network. From Hsieh down through the newest customer service rep, Zappos’ entire staff is driven by its ten core values. And the company has already begun implementing the new approach with about 150 employees.

But is it a sustainable choice for any business? he asked. In a holacracy, the titles disappear, but human dynamics won’t. In an environment where everyone is a leader, some other mechanism needs to be put in place to ensure that everyone can maintain and optimize the tenets of fairness, trust and transparency so the entire organization can move forward.

Read the full article « A Company Without Job Titles Will Still Have Hierarchies » written by Harrison Monarth, executive coach and the New York Times bestselling author of The Confident Speaker and the international bestseller Executive Presence.