Neutralizing the urge to roll my eyes, I sink deeper into the lime-green beanbag chair, a piece of furniture that seems designed specifically to prevent any human from maintaining a sense of professional dignity. Across from me sits Marcus, the founder, whose grey hoodie reportedly cost $337 and who is currently making eye contact with the intensity of a man trying to start a fire with his mind. He’s talking about ‘radical candor’ again.
The ‘flat’ hierarchy hasn’t eliminated power; it has simply made the rules of power invisible, which is, quite frankly, a much more efficient way to drive a person toward a nervous breakdown.
The Underground Hierarchy
This is the Great Lie of the modern workplace: the idea that by removing titles, you remove the human impulse to organize into ranks. It is a naive utopianism that ignores roughly 10,007 years of human social development. When you take away the official org chart, the hierarchy doesn’t vanish-it goes underground. It becomes a game of ‘who does the boss like to have a beer with?’ or ‘who can mirror the founder’s vocabulary most accurately?’
‘A watch doesn’t work if the gears think they’re all equal. If the balance wheel tries to do the job of the mainspring, the time dies.’
August works with calibres that contain 147 individual parts. There is a profound honesty in a machine. A screw doesn’t have an ego. It doesn’t try to influence the escape wheel through passive-aggressive Slack messages.
The Christmas Light Knot
Pulling threads tightens the plastic fist.
The satisfying moment of structure.
That is the feeling of navigating a ‘family-style’ corporate culture. You pull on a thread of ‘open communication’ and find yourself strangled by a knot of ‘cultural fit’ that you didn’t even know you were part of.
The Punch vs. The Poison
I’ve realized that I actually prefer the cold, hard edges of a traditional hierarchy. At least there, the power is honest. When a boss says ‘do this because I’m the boss,’ it’s a transaction. When a ‘peer’ in a flat hierarchy says ‘it would be great if we could all align on this,’ they are doing the same thing, but they’re wearing a mask of collaboration.
The ‘family’ metaphor is the worst offender. Families are places where you are loved unconditionally, yes, but they are also places of deep-seated guilt, unstated expectations, and the inability to ever truly leave.
The 257% Anxiety Increase
This trend of structurelessness is actually a form of management cowardice. By saying ‘we’re all in this together,’ Marcus gets to reap the rewards of the group’s success while diffusing the blame for any failure. If the project fails, it’s a ‘collective learning opportunity.’ If it succeeds, Marcus is the visionary who built a culture of ’empowerment.’ It’s a win-win for him and a 257-percent increase in anxiety for everyone else.
Anxiety (Flat Culture)
Clarity (Structured)
(Conceptual metric based on subjective experience)
In our professional lives, we crave the boundary. This is why service industries that prioritize clarity are so refreshing. When you hire
Pro Lawn Services, you aren’t entering into a philosophical debate… You are paying for a specific outcome-a 2.7-inch cut, defined edges, and a lack of weeds.
The Clarity of the Cut
There is no ‘radical candor’ required because the lawn doesn’t lie.
Finding the Line
I think back to August and his Christmas lights. He eventually got them untangled, but he had to cut two of the wires to do it. Sometimes, to find the structure, you have to break the illusion.
He spent 27 minutes soldering the wires back together once they were straight. That was the moment the mess became a line.
We are all currently living in the mess, terrified to be the ones who point out that the line is gone. We pretend the circle of trust is real while we keep our backs to the wall. We look for the 7th person to speak, because we know that’s the threshold of safety.
I’d rather know that the person across from me has the authority to make a decision so that I don’t have to spend 37 minutes of my life trying to guess what they want me to want.