An article by Jena McGregor In her column, “On Leadership,” appeared in the Washington Post today on Brian Robertson’s contract with Zappo’s, “Zappos Says Goodbye to Bosses.” Zappos is owned by Amazon but runs independently and has long been known for its unusual employee-responsive culture.

The unusual approach is called a “holacracy.” Developed by a former software entrepreneur, the idea is to replace the traditional corporate chain of command with a series of overlapping, self-governing “circles.” In theory, this gives employees more of a voice in the way the company is run.

John Bunch, Zappos “As we scaled, we noticed that the bureaucracy we were all used to was getting in the way of adaptability,” says Zappos’s John Bunch, who is leading the transition.

The article is not particularly clear in explaining holacracy and doesn’t make the connection to sociocracy or other egalitarian organizational methods like Ackoff’s circular organization or  Semler’s round pyramid. McGregor is also confusing when explaining the change from “managers” to “lead-links.” Holacracy’s lead-links are described very much like managers. No mention of policy setting by all members of the circle to guide the actions of the lead-link.

The article reports that “Twitter cofounder Evan Williams uses it at his new company, Medium, and time management guru David Allen uses it run his firm — but Zappos is by far the largest company to adopt the idea.”

Robertson began his first company, Ternary Software in Exton PA, in 2001 based on the unique model of forming partnerships with many of the companies for which it developed software. This gave Ternary a vested interest in the performance of the software they designed and allowed promising but still developing companies to access to quality software. In 2006 and 2007, Robertson published two articles on his use of sociocracy at Ternary: “The Sociocratic Method,” in the 2006 strategy+business issue of Booz Allen Hamilton’s internal newsletter,  and in 2007 in the Wall Street Journal, “Can a Company Be Run as a Democracy?”.