Yesterday, I waited to board my plane with my handwritten, 100% fake-looking boarding pass.
The boarding pass was an ordinary piece of paper that had just my name and the number of the flight on it. And that’s it — no other information on there. It was a consequence of yesterday’s IT meltdown.
At the gate, the crew first let in a few passengers who had managed to check in online and had assigned seats.
Then they realized that the majority of the remaining passengers were just like me. The remaining passengers all had stupid pieces of paper in their hands, without any assigned seats. And since the computers were all down, there was no way to assign seats in any normal way.
First, there was a bit of panic on the ground crew’s faces.
They started calling around to their superiors, consulting with each other, trying to ignore the questions and suggestions that pushy passengers were making to them.
In the end, the ground crew shrugged their shoulders.
“Ok everybody can board,” they said. “You can sit wherever you find a free seat.”
And it worked out just fine. The boarding completed was as quickly, or maybe more quickly, than with the usual “excuse me but you’re in my seat” hokey pokey.
Point being:
Let’s burn down all the computers and ticket-booking systems and rules about who sits where and who does what. Let’s abolish all the top-down mandates, because the people will self-organize just as well or better.
Anarchy!
“Uh, really?”
No, not really.
But there really might be cases where doing just what I suggested actually works.
And it might work for you, too, even if you don’t run an airline, but an info publishing business.
And as a case study, let me share with you an interesting and quick snippet of an interview. The interview is with a man named Bill Bonner who:
1. Is a famous copywriter
2. Founded and still owns Agora, a huge consortium of direct response brands that employs thousands of people
3. Is worth a few billion dollars thanks to his stake in all those publishing businesses
Here’s the thing though. You might think that a billion-dollar company requires strong and dedicated management. But that’s just the opposite of what Bonner is saying in this interview.
It turns out he has abolished not just the seating assignments inside Agora, but has even vacated the pilot’s seat, and has left it to the stewardesses and the passengers to figure out who does what, and how, including flying the plane:
“In France, for example, we tried telling people what to do — from London, no less. It was a disaster. Then, at the end of our ropes, we told the remaining French employees that they would have to figure it out for themselves. “Who will be in charge?” they wanted to know. ‘Whoever takes charge,’ we replied.”
I’m telling you this because maybe you’re like me, and you have an aversion to the idea of managing people.
Well, maybe you don’t have to manage people, or even really have any management, in order for people to work for you, and to good work for you well, and to make serious money for you.
It sounds risky, or like a pipe dream. I know. But if you’re curious to find out a bit more about Bonner’s “dynamic indifference” way of leading a business, you can read about it here: