This is the company that hires people at full, good pay to work only four days a week. I wrote about this in January:

Ryan Carson of the technology firm Treehouse proposes that maybe we can work four days a week and do more with it. He’s not trying to save money: you get paid your full, normal salary, you just don’t work five days a week. It sounds like he’s a productivity guru looking for a startling yet appealing angle, but the fella has his reasons and he’s put them to work: this is genuinely how his company is run.

– A Four-Day-Week With Pay (The Blank Screen), 7 January 2014

The real kicker for me, the reason to tell you about it, was that this was revealed after many months so the idea was tested. It wasn’t just a theory. Now the firm has revealed that there was something else going on:  you knew there was a catch, didn’t you? No, there isn’t. They were just doing something else and not telling one: they were getting rid of all managers.

If you are a manager and just paused with a biscuit at your lips, they didn’t fire them. They got rid of the role and of the title and everyone who was a manager now works alongside everyone else. Carson says it’s as if they hired six new workers.

Now rather than the standard model of how a business runs, Treehouse has a holacracy: anyone in the firm – anyone – can have an idea and try to get it done. Rally support, get others in on the idea, and if enough do, it gets done. If they don’t, it doesn’t. (Holacracy is a new term to me: if you don’t know it, think of how bittorrent works by spreading the work between many peers instead from a central source. Or think of bees. Carson says it’s like a beehive. And Wikipedia gets serious on the topic.)

Carson says:

It was a bold move and one that not everyone was convinced of. We proposed to change the way the company operated and give all employees 100% control of their time and let them decide what they work on each day. From now on no one would tell anyone what to do, not even the CEO. (Me!) – See more at: http://ryancarson.com/post/61562761297/no-managers-why-we-removed-bosses-at-treehouse#sthash.JbjTp3SW.dpuf

He says that in his blog, The Naive Optimist, where he has begun a whole series of articles about this. You would expect that he’s going to tell you at length how great this idea is and, actually, fair enough. If it hadn’t worked, you have to assume we’d never have heard a word about it and Treehouse would’ve gone back to the old system. So yes, there is a lot about how well it’s working. But it’s fascinating and most especially so when he gets into why it isn’t. Why it fails, when it fails, and what they have to do about it.

Oh, and Treehouse is a firm doing online teaching for coding. Like you cared. You just want your firm to do the same.