Semco. You may want to read Ricardo Semler's book http://www.amazon.com/Maverick-Success-Behind-Unusual-Workpl... it's 20 years old but for some reason it's not a classic in startups or US business environments (edit: oh I see someone mentioned it). He wrote a more recent book I haven't read: http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Day-Weekend-Changing-Work-Works-... anyone with comments on this one?

'Maverick', by Ricardo Semler, was written in 1988 and is well known among business types:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0446670553/

SEMCO, to me, is the best example of this. While they haven't fired all of their managers, they are a very large company doing self-management in a whole bunch of different verticals.

Books by the SEMCO founder, Ricardo Semler:

Maverick - http://www.amazon.com/Maverick-Success-Behind-Unusual-Workpl...

The Seven Day Weekend - http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Day-Weekend-Changing-Work-Works-...

I think what he's saying is he read this [1] instead and then decided to put it in practice... again.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Maverick-Success-Behind-Unusual-Workpl...

You're not alone. Here's an early variant of such a policy. SEMCO, a Brazilian company run by Ricardo Semler, has since 1980s had the policy where people could set their own salaries.

Some excerpts off his book on 37signals: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/945-excerpts-from-ricardo-sem...

His book: http://www.amazon.com/Maverick-Success-Behind-Unusual-Workpl...

Holacracy is an instance of organizational democracy, but it's not new - I took a holacracy seminar 6 years ago. Kudos to Medium for using the framework though - it's one of the few that lays out, soup to nuts, how to run a democratic company.

There are many companies that operate using democracy as an organizing principle - Semco is the great-granddaddy of them all (two books - Maverick[1] and the 7 Day Weekend[2] - were written by Semco's founder, Ricardo Semler, about how Semco operates).

Other well-known democratically-run companies include Zappos, WL Gore, DaVita (a $12B company), and Dreamhost.

If you're interested, take a look at WorldBlu[3] for more - they've been building a community of these kinds of companies, have tons of resources on their site, and even have a conference on organizational democracy.

[1] - http://www.amazon.com/The-Seven-Day-Weekend-Changing-Works/d...

[2] - http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0446670553

[3] - http://worldblu.com/

I'm pretty certain this article is a ripoff of Ricardo Semler's "3 Whys" technique he described in his book from 1995 (http://www.amazon.com/Maverick-Success-Behind-Unusual-Workpl...). Not that this is a bad thing, but there are many more, better articles describing this using more clinical language and providing guidance for real management application.

Here are a couple of top Google results: http://www.managementexchange.com/blog/forget-empowerment-ai...

http://www.ict.swin.edu.au/personal/ebihari/

and even a version of The Art of War: http://www.worldmarkacademy.com/moodle/file.php/1/3.pdf