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"How do I make them do ...?" versus "How can we do ...?"

The first question I hear being asked by anti-Agile zealots and by people who favor hierarchical organizations (where decisions and information tend to flow one way -- down). The second question: I'd like to hear it being asked more often.

Laurent Bossavit:

There is a school of thought that if conditions are right, teams actually work better when there isn't a boss; they're called "self-directed work teams", or self-organized teams in the Agile jargon. With teams where "someone has to be the boss", or the single brain that directs all the activity, you also have to suppress the motivations of the individuals, or at least provide enough incentives to ensure that they completely align with the bosses' motivations, and not work against them. Robert Austin's book "Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations" does a great job of illustrating the problems with that strategy.

I've heard of one large company that only has one job title: "associate". Here's an article about W.L. Gore & Associates. Quotes:

FEW COMPANIES [...] can say they have surpassed $1.3 billion in sales while operating a company that has no managers or employees. [...]

When Gore first started the company in 1958 [...], he became interested in Douglas McGregor's management book The Human Side of Enterprise (1960, McGraw-Hill), which espoused Theory Y management, a practice similar to what is now known as empowerment, and the lattice organization, which is characterized by an absence of assigned or assumed authority. The lattice organization has sponsors rather than bosses or managers; associates rather than employees; natural leadership defined by followership; person-to-person communication; objectives set by those who must make them happen; and tasks and functions organized through commitments. [...]

Any highly innovative company needs to have a free flow of knowledge," says John E. Sawyer, associate professor in the University of Delaware's Dept. of Business Administration. "The structure [at] W.L. Gore stimulates that form of communication." [...]

New associates at the firm are required to participate in a week-long orientation session emphasizing cultural integration. Three of those days are spent on direct-communication skills, an important element of a lattice environment. [...]