The most quietly radical management fact of the last thirty years is running on the device you are reading this on. The Linux kernel, the Apache server, and the libraries under most modern software were built by people who mostly did not share an employer, an org chart, or a paycheck for the work. If self-management could not coordinate complex work, none of it would exist.
A third mode of production
Yochai Benkler (2002) named the thing that classical management theory could not place. Commons-based peer production, he argued, is a mode distinct from both the firm and the market. It coordinates complex work without managerial hierarchy and without price contracts, through decentralized goal-setting and distributed execution, governed by participation, reputation, and non-monetary motivation rather than the authority of employment. He defined it by four features: decentralized goal-setting and execution, a diverse range of motives including non-financial ones, non-exclusive approaches to property, and governance through participation and meritocracy rather than contract. His claim was economic, not sentimental: under the right information conditions, this mode can outperform both the firm and the market at assembling knowledge work. Two decades on, the software supply chain of the world economy is his footnote.
This matters far beyond software because it settles a prior question. The academic definition of a self-managing organization, from Michael Lee and Amy Edmondson (2017), is one that radically and systematically decentralizes authority away from the manager-subordinate relationship. Their synthesis of the management literature explains why anyone would bother: hierarchy executes known tasks reliably in stable conditions, but it inhibits non-routine problem-solving that crosses functional lines and it tends toward rigidity. Open source is that argument made concrete. The work is non-routine, boundary-crossing, and fast-changing, exactly the terrain where hierarchy struggles and distributed coordination shines.
Bossless is not structureless
The romantic reading of open source, flat and ruleless, does not survive contact with the data, and pretending otherwise would repeat the Spotify mistake in a new costume. Chakraborti and colleagues (2022) analyzed the written policy of the Apache Software Foundation and found evidence of both flat and bureaucratic governance at once. Peer-produced communities do not fit neatly into conventional organizational theory. They blend egalitarian ideals with formal institutional rules, and they routinely display a meritocratic hierarchy. The crucial distinction is what that hierarchy rests on. It is earned through contribution and reputation, not conferred by an employment relationship. There is authority. There is no boss in the payroll sense.
That is the subtle, load-bearing lesson. Coordination without a manager still produces structure: written rules, roles, code review, and status earned through work. The absence of a boss is not the absence of order. It is order sourced from contribution rather than from position. A maintainer's word carries weight because of what they have shipped, and that weight can be lost as easily as it was gained, which is a discipline most corporate hierarchies never impose on their own titles.
What a company can actually borrow
The temptation is to conclude that a firm should simply delete its managers. That is the wrong lesson, and it is the one that sinks most attempts. What open source really demonstrates is a substitution: it replaces positional authority with a working set of institutions, transparent rules, visible contribution, peer review, and reputation that compounds. A company that removes the manager without building those substitutes does not get Linux. It gets a vacuum that office politics fills. The design task is to install the replacement before you remove the original, in the order that keeps the work coordinated the entire time.
The practical read
Leaders who assume that removing managers means removing structure have misread the strongest example of self-management there is. Open source shows that complex, high-stakes work can be coordinated through decentralized goal-setting and reputation (Benkler, 2002), on exactly the non-routine terrain where hierarchy underperforms (Lee and Edmondson, 2017). It also shows that this only works because the community builds explicit rules and earns a meritocratic authority to replace the one it discarded (Chakraborti et al., 2022). The design task inside a company is the same. If you take out the manager, you have to put in the substitute that open source discovered by necessity: transparent rules, visible contribution, and authority that people earn rather than receive.
Sources
- Benkler (2002). Coase's Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm. Names commons-based peer production, defined by decentralized goal-setting, diverse motives, non-exclusive property, and governance by participation and meritocracy. https://yalelawjournal.org/article/coases-penguin-or-linux-and-the-nature-of-the-firm
- Lee and Edmondson (2017). Self-managing organizations: Exploring the limits of less-hierarchical organizing. Provides the canonical definition of a self-managing organization and explains where hierarchy underperforms. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191308517300059
- Chakraborti, Bulat, Zhong, Sen and Frey (2022). Deconstructing written rules and hierarchy in peer produced software communities. Finds open-source governance blends flat and bureaucratic forms and rests on earned meritocratic authority, not bosslessness. https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.07992