So those teams report to _no one_? Really?

What you're describing is actually a cluster of teams that (in all likelihood) report to a single manager (or director, or whatever).

I don't believe that your teams are truly autonomous.

In the real world, we have to get work done with flawed, imperfect humans. If our expectation is that everyone will always read their emails carefully, we are delusional. Perfection is the enemy of good.

A person who refuses to indulge others' weaknesses, within reason, is someone who will not get far or make friends in the real world. You certainly won't make friends with *me* with that attitude. You, yes you too, have weaknesses, despite your apparent insistence on perfection.

I hear you, but when people send long emails, it's my experience that most people don't read them, and especially they don't read them paying attention to the details.

If "being a tie breaker" were the only thing a manager does, then I'd agree with you. But you conveniently left out all the other items in my list, making your argument artificially simple.

What if there are three approaches being pushed by three team members? Or four? Are you going to create four teams to prove out all four ways? What if you start building out all these teams, and two people in one of the teams disagrees?

The reality is, as long as a team has more than one person, there will be disagreements. Somebody has to resolve those disagreements. Your managerless-solution quickly becomes a management nightmare.

So you have to _release_ both products (because if you don't release them, the customer never sees them) and then let the customer decide?

What does happen to the team that loses? Maybe some customers like the losing product better, and some customers like the winning product better. Now what?

And your approach wastes a LOT of money to make a point that managers aren't needed. You now have two teams doing essentially the same project, in different ways. You are essentially throwing away all the hours spent by the losing team. It would be better, in my opinion, to do good planning up front, and spend hours / dollars on only one team, following a good design from the start. No sane company is going to set up such a competitition.

So in your scenario, who is going to determine which product is better? Wouldn't that be a...manager? And what happens when someone in your smaller team disagrees with someone else in the smaller team? No, this scenario doesn't make anything better, it just makes the groups smaller. If you have more than one person on a "team" you will have issues to resolve between team members. It's called human nature.

I actually lived through your approach once. Two dev teams were given the same assignment. The better product would win, the inferior product's team would be fired. Talk about back-stabbing and sabotage! It was by far the *worst* environment I've ever worked in. But not for long, the company plowed through $300 million in investor money and went out of business. Stupidest management decision ever.

Apparently you can't deal with the truth, because every argument you just made, claimed I said something that I didn't say.

I never said the teacher was qualified to diagnose ADAH. What I did say was that the teacher might have seen sufficient signs of concern, to warrant a referral to a doctor.

I never said you *were* in the subset of parents who don't know how ugly their own children can be. Are you? You refused to listen to your teacher, and to the doctor your son saw. Those are two important clues that you might not be seeing reality.

I never said that doctors "never" rubber stamp anything. I do say it's not as common as parents claim, when a doctor diagnoses their child with a "label" the parents don't agree with.

So when you respond, how about let's stick with the truth, and not claim I said things I didn't say.

Nobody said anything about lawbreaking. The "challenge" I replied to, had nothing to do with legality, but with outrage.

“White people” are no better and no smarter about “gaming the system” than any other color! Dropping the assumption that any particular race is superior or inferior makes it much MUCH easier to empirically, philosophically, and humanely improve this world. The confederacy found that out the hard way.

That is fighting imaginary demons. Don’t forget Lincoln’s and MLK’s awesome advice: judge by individual merit - not by group identity.

Seems like a win for lazy students!

It all depends on the manager. A good manager (and good managers do exist) will find ways to use their time wisely, they will limit their time in meetings, and the meetings they do attend or run, will be productive.

Not everyone is good at absorbing written material. For that matter, not everyone is good at writing informative emails. Often, the conversation *is* the thing that has value.

There are some ingenious managers who will drag out a meeting, with or without chairs!

No managers, huh? How does that work when two people disagree, and can't come to an agreement? Who makes decisions about who to hire? Who decides when it's time to let somebody go, and who carries out that unpleasant task? Who decides what projects are higher priority? Who reins in executives who want everything right now? Who do you go to when you want to talk about your next pay raise?

You might have gotten rid of your managers, but I'll bet somebody is still doing all these tasks. In other words, somebody is doing the manager's job, without the title.