Sarah E. Needleman

rewards, how you define success, different goals.

And so whether or not the companies do that, they haven't said.

But the experts say that on the surface, like you said, lipstick, it's just a title change and a brief change in description is really not enough.

You really have to go deep and set new goals and ways to measure reward success.

Well, it's a good point you bring up because there was a very well-known example of this, Zappos, in the early 2010s.

removed hierarchy altogether and went with a super flat organization.

And it was considered pretty orthodox at the time and still would be to some extent.

And it did not go well.

They saw a huge number of employees quit.

And it just caused, like you said, people didn't have a good sense of accountability, who's responsible for what.

And it just didn't work out.

But other companies have also sort of gone that direction.

Netflix notoriously downplayed the importance of managers and wanted people to be more autonomous.

And it's worked out for them, but they haven't gone to the extreme that Zappos did.

And so like with anything in life, if you...

The extreme ends usually don't work out.

Somewhere in the middle is often the better way.

But the general gist, as you said, was smaller teams are better at innovating.

There's nobody bossing everybody around.

Everybody has a say.