In March 2015 Tony Hsieh, the chief executive of the online shoe retailer Zappos, sent a memo that committed the company to self-management under a system called Holacracy. Employees who did not want to work without managers were offered a buyout. “Self-management and self-organization is not for everyone,” he wrote.
Fourteen percent of employees took the first offer. By January 2016, 18 percent of the workforce, about 260 people, had left since the memo.