I don’t know any Archie and I’m there, not here. But I know the word hierarchy. A truly dreadful word.
Dreadful? To me, yes. Another one of those words with Greek roots, like so many that still rule us today. Hierarchy is built on the Greek word “hieros,” meaning something like holy. The add-on is even more irritating, because “archein” stands for ruling as part of the rank order among priests. The decisive moment in my then-young life as a commercial apprentice with hierarchy was the answer to one of my why-questions. “Why? Because I, your boss, say so. Full stop.” Yes, that was the point that began to gnaw inside and grate outside. Why should I follow an instruction just because someone tells me to? A small example? While gathering my apprenticeship experience in payroll, I noticed the different numbers between the workshop apprentices and me, the office pencil. I ignored the hierarchical ladder and knocked on the director’s door. In a youthful surge of outrage, I complained about the unfairness. The result was startling. My wage was adjusted downward.
Revolt is expensive.
I felt the same unease when my father tried to command respect-consciousness in me. I was supposed to show people respect because they held a position — usually a higher one — in society. And again I asked: “Why?” An occupied position is not yet a licence for respect, even if it’s demanded. Or is it? Respect hangs on the person who carries a function responsibly — not on the title that occupies it.
Yes, hierarchy has some advantages. The fire department, the police, or top bodies in political spheres often need to decide fast. And need to be able to rely on their “subordinates.” Someone has to give the orders who is responsible and capable of doing so. Clear to me.
A hierarchy and its participants are first granted the “power of their office.” And that’s often where the dilemma begins, when the office-holders fall in love with the power.
Are there communities that get by without hierarchy?
No. No known society can do entirely without the hierarchical system — but some have kept it radically small. The hierarchy, not the people.
Hunter-gatherer groups wandered at a time when land ownership wasn’t yet a thing. The !Kung (Kalahari), Hadza (Tanzania), or Mbuti (Congo) know no chiefs. Decisions are discussed and made in conversation. Any claim to prestige is actively curbed: whoever boasts as a hunter gets mocked, so no one sets themselves above the others. Anthropologist Christopher Boehm calls this a “reverse dominance hierarchy” — the group rules over the one who wants to rule.
Around my corner, it was the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy). Six nations that made their decisions by consensus at the council fires. Chiefs were installed by the clan mothers, and if need be, removed again. All power to the mothers. There was no chain of command, only persuasion. Benjamin Franklin studied this phenomenon and put forward the thesis that it influenced the US Constitution. The thesis is contested, but a sympathetic one.
Switzerland itself set up valley communities without nobility through the Landsgemeinde. The Federal Charter of 1291 was a refusal of foreign judges and rulers. Not hierarchy-free, exactly, but deliberately headless: the Federal President is primus inter pares for one year, and most Swiss don’t even know his name. That’s exactly the point.
An excellent example of a very flat and small hierarchy that I keep bringing up whenever the topic turns to company structures: the Semco Group in Brazil.
Semco was a machinery builder in São Paulo making ship pumps, industrial mixers, and cooling systems. In 1980, Ricardo Semler, 21 years old, took over the company from his father Antonio Curt, an Austrian emigrant. On the first day, he let go of about 60 percent of the top management tier. Out with the existing hierarchy must have been the idea. A few years later, he decided the people weren’t the problem, but the structure was. What he then dismantled over twenty years was less the hierarchy as such than its control apparatus. What remained: no control system. Full stop.
The time clock — workers set their own hours, even in production. The team coordinates among itself. There’s no org chart, and the company handbook is a twenty-page “Survival Manual” with cartoons in it. Expense receipts are submitted but not checked. The explanation? Checking costs more than the actual fraud would. And where does the hierarchy sit? It’s divided into three concentric circles. Six “Counselors” at the centre, among them “Partners” who head the business units, “Coordinators” as the only management tier below them, and everyone else “Associates.” Whoever works as a Coordinator has no Coordinator above them. And the top spot itself? The CEO post rotates every six months among the Counselors. Even Ricardo Semler has no office and no fixed desk. At Semco, everything rotates — even the boss.
What must it have been like for an apprentice like me at Semco? A young person learns that responsibility and freedom belong together.
Three mechanisms hold the construct up. All the numbers are laid open, balance sheet and payroll included; the union trained the workers to read balance sheets, so the openness would actually accomplish something. The vote comes from below: supervisors are anonymously graded by their staff twice a year, and whoever consistently scores poorly loses the role. New managers are interviewed by the very people they’ll later lead. Employees propose their own salaries, with an eye on the open market data and their colleagues’ wages — and with the knowledge that a salary set too high endangers their own job in the next crisis. On top of that comes a profit-sharing scheme of around a quarter of the unit profit, and yes, the distribution is decided by the workforce itself. And then there’s the satellite program: those seeking independence are given machinery and a first contract. That’s how employees become subcontractors.
The numbers speak for themselves. Revenue rose from around four million dollars in 1982 to roughly 212 million in 2003. The workforce grew from 90 to about 3,000, including through Brazilian inflation and several recessions. Semco’s employees agreed to temporarily cut their wages to avoid layoffs. Semco today is no longer “just” a machinery company but a service provider. Semler shifted toward education — the Lumiar schools — and toward marketing his method; the Semco Style Institute now sits in the Netherlands.
Back to the opening question: hierarchy as a system for managing people. Or ruling them. Or their being ruled. These examples confirm for me, the old hippie, that you can credit and trust people with more than a hierarchy would have you believe. People can decide what’s good for the community, not only for the individual.
Well, I managed to catch that bend in the story after all.
