There has been a recent dialog around a theme I’ll call “hacking the corporation” – creating novel approaches to building young companies, particularly when they are in their formative start-up stage and pre-product market fit. One of them, reinventing board meetings (or, “Why Board Meetings Suck”), has gotten some attention from leading thinkers like Steve Blank and Brad Feld.
I’d like to submit another item to add to the “hacking the corporation” punch list: Eliminating titles.
At business school, I learned all about titles and hierarchies and the importance of organizational structure. When I joined my first start-up after graduation, e-commerce leader Open Market, I found the operating philosophy of the founder jarring – he declared no one would have titles in the first few years. If you needed a title for external reasons, our founder told us, we should feel free to make one up. But we would avoid using labels internally. In other words, there would be no “vice president” or “director” or other such hierarchical denominations.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Launching a start-up? Do it without titles. | VentureBeat
Author:Jeff Bussgang
