• by Kaila Colbin , Featured Contributor, October 9, 2015

There is a temptation among progressive, pro-social entrepreneurs — people like Tony Hsieh of Zappos or Ben Kaufman, (formerly) of Quirky —  driven, I believe, by a desire to to do things in a more awesome way. I suspect that most who succumb to this temptation are acting out of goodwill and benevolence of purpose.

I’m talking about the temptation to reject the corporate structures of recent decades. I’m talking about the temptation to declare that, just because a certain kind of work environment is meaningless and soul-destroying, it has nothing of value to offer. I’m talking about the temptation to believe that ‘90s capitalism -- call it Capitalism 1.0 -- is evil, but today’s capitalism -- 2.0, natch -- is not.

I agree, to a degree. I could not imagine myself, or, for that matter, any of my loved ones, in a cubicle, processing orders for paperclips or whatever is your best exemplar of an ungratifying corporate job. Our work culture tends toward the patriarchal, the power-imbalanced, the dehumanizing.

Entrepreneurial humans who are not inclined towards this kind of environment are quite right to want to create — or, at the very least implement — a better alternative. After all, if it’s broke, we should fix it.

Job titles the source of petty power plays? Get rid of the job titles, then. Salary inequities causing tension? Publish all company salaries publicly, and set a max multiplier for the CEO’s salary relative to the lowest-paid employee.

Yet, sometimes, in our attempts to abandon the shackles of yesteryear in favor of a more enlightened, more generous realm of possibility, we forget that we didn’t necessarily set up those shackles in the first place because we wanted a patriarchal, power-imbalanced, dehumanizing workplace. Sometimes, we set up those shackles because they solved a problem for us, because they added value in some way.

Take, for example, the idea of managers, something Zappos has recently discarded, as CEO Hsieh says, “in order to eliminate the legacy management hierarchy.”

There is an element of Jedi mind trick at play here. If nobody wants to work for The Man, let’s pretend like there is no Man, like we’re not a billion-dollar e-commerce company owned by an even bigger corporate giant now infamous for cruelty to its employees.

Hsieh’s approach, by some accounts, seems to offer a different kind of cruelty: a cruelty of uncertainty, of poor communication and limited follow-through. “[S]o far,” wrote Roger Hodge in New Republic earlier this week, “even months later, no one seems to know whether they will [take a pay cut]. It wasn't just that management roles have been deprecated. Almost every management policy has been called into question. Everything -- including compensation, performance management, discipline, time management and attendance, appointments and promotions, recruitment and dismissal -- was very much in flux.”

There is a reason compensation policies exist. There is a reason performance management policies exist. There are many excellent reasons to have systems for recruitment and dismissal.

Management structures are much like a democratic government. Their problems do not necessarily lie with the systems themselves. Their problems arise when the systems are distorted to feed the wolves of pettiness and power hunger within us.

If we can find a way to deal effectively with our wolves, we may realize that these old structures aren’t entirely useless, after all.