Dive Brief:

• Zappos is restructuring, abandoning all job titles and hierarchy in favor of holacracy.
• The traditional corporate hierarchy will be replaced by a flat "holarchy" of about 400 circles that contain any number of roles for the employees within.
• The restructuring is expected to be completed by December 2014, and with 1,500 employees, Zappos will be the largest company to adopt the system so far.

Dive Insight:

The decision to embrace holacracy came after Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, who was trying to prevent bureaucracy from taking hold as the company grew, met management consultancy HolocracyOne's founder, Brian Robertson. The general idea behind the flat model and lack of titles is "radical transparency." While that isn't a revolutionary concept, it helps facilitate a politics-free, fast-evolving organization where people can't hide under titles, and encourages more people to take charge instead of designating leaders. It sounds interesting on paper, but time will tell if it can stand the test of being scaled to a major retail corporation.