The author believes that principles that make societies more prosperous are also applicable to organizations:

I came to realize that there were, likewise, laws that govern human well-being... It seemed to me that these laws are fundamental not only to the well-being of societies, but also to the miniature societies of organizations.

The MBM is a constellation of mental models grouped around five dimensions: vision, virtue and talents, knowledge processes, decision rights, and incentives. A reader familiar with economics will surely find many familiar ones among them (such as creative destruction, opportunity costs, time preference, subjective value, dispersed knowledge, and many others). But occasionally the author offers an interpretation or application of a familiar concept that provides better insight into the life of the organization. For example, freedom of speech as a vehicle to tap into employees' knowledge or thinking of salary as an advanced payment for the value that employee will be creating. Below I will focus on some of the points that the author raises. 

The most insightful were the chapters dedicated to the knowledge process and decision rights. Others I'll touch only briefly.

Vision

One can think about the vision as a mission statement. The only additional spin in this book is the mindfulness of creative destruction. Whatever is the way the business delivers value to the customers now, it will become obsolete with time either because the customers won't value it anymore or there will be more efficient ways to deliver similar value. So the vision should not be only about how the company is delivering value to its customers but also how it will be continuously reinventing itself to offset the creative destruction.

Virtue and Talents

This chapter offers a fairly typical exploration of the topics like soft skills and hard skills, values, culture, hiring with cultural fit in mind, and performance review. Majority of these ideas one can find elsewhere in the leadership literature. 

Knowledge Processes

This part is influenced by Hayek's seminal work on dispersed knowledge. Information that is required to understand to what usage the resources should be directed cannot be possessed by one person. Bits of this information are spread between people who, through market interactions, make this information explicit via the prices, profit, and loss. Here’s Charles Koch:

To succeed in an uncertain future, a company must draw on the knowledge dispersed among its employees… A market-based knowledge process coordinates dispersed knowledge, applying it at the appropriate time and place to enable the company to profitably satisfy changing needs. Mechanisms for coordinating knowledge are indispensable for bringing about the spontaneous order necessary for creating superior value.

Thus freedom of speech becomes crucial.

The quality of this process depends on a willingness to respectfully engage in open, honest and objective debate, to challenge the status quo, and to consider humbly any challenges to our own beliefs, proposals and actions. 

Without this kind of organizational freedom of speech the company can become too ossified to register the looming creative distraction.

To drive the process of creative destruction internally, nothing can be immune to challenge. Each of us must help foster an open environment that invites challenge and embraces change. If you find that your views are rarely challenged, or that you rarely challenge the views of others, something is wrong.

Also not all the data is created equal. Market-generated knowledge is superior to whatever is generated inside the company by internal accounting because it taps into the dispersed knowledge of market participants. Therefore market data must take precedence:

When a business sells products or services to external customers, the prices reflect economic reality. When transferring products internally, prices should also reflect the market alternative. As such, the internal price should represent the weighted average market price… Transferring products using a cost-based system leads to faulty profit signals and bad decisions.

Decision rights

The tragedy of commons can plague companies the same way it plagues communities. The MBM's antidote to that is to emulate the role property rights play in society with decision rights:

Clear decision rights allow employees to allocate, consume or conserve the company’s resources as they attempt to create value. They also enable employees to know what they are responsible for and to be held accountable, just like owners. 

It’s also interesting how these decision rights are acquired. It’s not proximity to the process or the best knowledge about it that gives an employee decision rights. Instead, the author uses David Ricardo’s concept of comparative advantage.

An employee has a comparative advantage among a group of employees when he or she can perform an activity more effectively at a lower opportunity cost than others... 

I hardly can imagine the process or calibration they use to measure opportunity cost in this context. So what's actually meant by that? It seems what's meant here a more a less a track record of success

Decision rights expand for those who consistently make sound, value-adding decisions and contract for those who do not.

Years of experience, credentials or titles have not proven to be reliable predictors of good decision-making ability. Only demonstrated success in decisionmaking reveals an individual’s decision-making ability, and then, only for that type of decision.'

Potentially that may present a chicken-and-egg problem here. If one first needs to consistently make good decisions to get the decision rights, how is one to make a first good decision without having the decision rights first? Most likely, some decisions are made even before an individual attains certain decision rights (a loan of a kind if we assume that decision rights are approximations for rights) but nothing is said explicitly about that.

Incentives

Most of the discussion of the incentives goes in line with what can be found elsewhere in leadership literature. That is, managers should build trust to understand what people reporting to them value (their subjective value) and incentivize them accordingly. 

Incentives, of course, need to be aligned with the company's interest in order to address the principal-agent problem. An interesting example was given about deriving bonuses for salespeople as a bigger percentage from the price above the cost rather than a smaller percentage from the total sale—the second can incentivize making bigger discounts. 

The following is quite an unorthodox suggestion but makes total sense given that one of the values of the Koch Industries is ‘principled entrepreneurship’

no limit should be put on an employee’s compensation so employees will not put a limit on the value they create.

Also the author rightly criticizes some of quite common perverse incentives. Such as thinking in terms of budgets:

Some companies institute fixed budgets as a way of controlling costs. Under this system, profitable opportunities are often missed as managers reject profitable proposals that would cause their budgets to be exceeded… This practice usually results in removing profitable expenditures and people along with unprofitable ones, tending to make the company less rather than more profitable. 

Or focus on the short-term market valuation that can affect publicly traded companies.

Opportunity cost 

Opportunity cost is mentioned a lot in different sections of the book. It seems to take a very important place in the world of MBM mental models. One application of this concept is to constantly look for an alternative, more profitable usage of the resources, and mind you, profitable resources as well.

Working on a profitable activity is wasteful when there is another, even more profitable activity that could be performed instead. It sounds counterintuitive, but profit can be increased by eliminating some profitable, value-adding activities when doing so enables a business to capture higher-valued opportunities.

The below quotes suggest that there is some advanced way to use the concept of opportunity costs by accounting for forgone opportunities. But frankly, from these quotes it’s not very clear how exactly it’s done in practice. It would be great to see some examples.

To encourage entrepreneurship among our employees, including appropriate risk-taking, we began to consider the profit forgone from an opportunity missed to be equivalent to a book loss resulting from a failed venture

Prudent risk-taking should be encouraged by applying the concept of opportunity cost. Within limits, the profits forgone from a missed opportunity should be considered the same as losses from a failed venture. The value of missed opportunities, as well as other shortcomings, should be estimated, included in evaluations of the employee’s performance and communicated to the employee. This eliminates the incentive to forgo riskier opportunities that are in the company’s interest

The structure of the organization

An important question is what kind of structure is promoted by MBM in order to facilitate the economic calculation process? The author suggests that profit centers should be rendered as atomic as possible.

Identifying and efficiently creating profit centers at the lowest practical level can provide a substantial competitive advantage. Ideally, each plant should be a profit center and, if it makes more than one product, the profitability of each product should be tracked.

That allows market processes to function internally within companies 

The purpose of internal markets is to provide internal signals, so that decision making can be based on this information. This framework ensures decisions are made on the basis of business profitability to the same extent as external purchases. Proper internal markets generate knowledge, guide decisions, reinforce ownership and accountability, encourage entrepreneurship and help eliminate waste.

Yet he doesn’t go as far as to offer individual PnL but suggests that an employee's marginal contribution should be estimated and contributed to his or her compensation. 

[Marginal contribution] refers to the portion of value created that can be assigned to a specific change, factor or individual. Understanding an employee’s marginal contribution requires answering several questions: What results were achieved? Would the opportunity have been captured without the employee? What would the results have been without this individual? How did this employee contribute to our culture?

Also Koch doesn't support the idea of full decentralization and self-organization:

Those with local knowledge are often in a better position to solve the problem at hand. The ideas and creative energy of all employees should be leveraged, but universally decentralized decision-making has its own problems. Some decisions, if made at the local level, can be unprofitable because a broader perspective is required.

The author notices that in a suggested structure of atomic profit centers there are pockets that are not subjected to efficient internal market economic calculation

Such support services, without oversight, tend to maximize their services rather than maximize their contribution to profitability. To eliminate this problem wherever possible, put these services under the control of the relevant business, or use the internal market or other mechanisms and measures

The suggestion is to be very cautious about them and try to use whatever possible way to measure them, e.g. by benchmarking with the external market.1

Conclusion

What makes 'The Science of Success' particularly interesting is that it provides insight into how someone who is obviously well-versed in free-market economics and obviously immensely successful in business translates this knowledge into practice. 

This book is short and accessible. On one hand, it could serve as an introduction to very basic economics. On the other hand, it can help a practitioner, a business owner or a manager, by enriching their thinking with insights tested by time and based on economic theory. And the framing of most of those insights is quite different from what you can find in other business and leadership literature.

Having said that, there there are two drawbacks I noticed. First, the book is quite uneven. Many pages are dedicated to quite generic leadership and management advice one can find elsewhere (for example, things like hiring with alignment to values in mind or having three different performance ratings for high-performance, solid performers, and underperformers) while others are extremely dense and unorthodox. And related to that is the second drawback--there is not enough time dedicated to the most complicated and novel ideas. Some of those I mention above. 

The book is not a practical guide and it's quite short to go into much detail on all the topics it's dealing with. It's more of a teaser and the reader would need to fill in some gaps on his or her own to integrate the ideas and make them applicable. As a side note: perhaps some of the gaps are covered in another book that Charles Koch has written--'Good Profit' which I will be also reviewing.

At that point, the owners decided to try something radical and see where it will lead them. What they achieved is a great exemplar of how market-based volunteer coordination can work within an organization leading to significant cost reduction, improvement in productivity, quality, employee remuneration and engagement.

The book goes into great detail about the stages and steps taken on this path of transformation. It went as a series of experiments. The first one was to change the overtime compensation.

Data showed little correlation between hours worked and output produced. It seemed possible that overtime payments were encouraging long work hours without increasing production.

So instead of paying for the overtime hours to complete the required orders, each employee got a fixed overtime bonus equal to their previous average overtime pay. What happened then is, once the overtime bonus was secure, employees started hitting the target in fewer hours. Quality remained the same; working hours fell by 20%. That was the first real productivity-increasing program the company was able to achieve in years.

When the employees' self-interest was directed in the right way a magic thing happened. People started doing more with less time.

Internal market

Step by step, experiment by experiment they build what they called the fractal model. Eventually, everybody was operating as a virtual company. Everyone had their individual P&L (profit and loss) account and balance sheet and was participating in the internal market trading and making agreements with each other.

the internal market... provided the price discovery that valued each person’s contribution to the organisation.

In a traditional company and at Matt Black pre-transformation, it is next to impossible to track individual contributions. The internal market made everyone's contribution visible. It improved cooperation and directly awarded better performance.

Coordination

Typically company buys working time from employees. Managers coordinate productive activities. They decide and control how employees spend their time. With the internal market, managerial coordination is replaced with price coordination. Market interactions uncover prices. Prices are used to decide what needs to be done.

[Employees] form consortia and internal supply chains to satisfy contracts. These voluntary, self-selected teams have proved themselves to be much more effective than the previous teams we allocated to projects, both in terms of capability and cost effectiveness. The individual virtual companies formed into a self-supporting network.

Cost-cutting

The problem with internal bureaucracy is that it tends to grow. Executives in charge of bigger teams have more status and influence. So often cutting costs is not in their interest. Are the costs warranted? It's hard to tell without seeing the real contribution.

The internal market made visible who was responsible for huge costs without producing much value. Admin functions such as 'supervision, quality management, stores, finance and accounting, human resource management and purchasing, as well as a range of bureaucratic activities associated with statutory and regulatory compliance' were dissolved. Their work either became obsolete or it was efficiently devolved to the employees in production cells. For example, production cells took on responsibility for purchasing and quality control.

It led to immense savings. It also improved the speed and quality of decisions because people with the most knowledge made the decisions.

The right parts were ordered at the right time and in the right quantity because they were purchased by the people most familiar with the requirements. On arrival, the parts were properly checked as they were being inspected by the people who were most familiar with them and who were going to utilise them. The price advantage of buying in bulk, the promise of centralised purchasing, proved to be insignificant compared to the many advantages of decentralised purchasing.

Employee compensation

The fractal model aligned employees' self-interest with the interest of the company and its customers. The internal market revealed how much value everyone is bringing. And then, everyone was paid accordingly.

The payment consists of a fixed salary and a 20% profit-sharing bonus. Everyone has an incentive to increase their individual profit because they get a significant part of it.

People can fast track their basic pay, mirroring their increased ability to utilise their talents and add value. In some cases, this new approach led employees to earn double or even triple what they could command in the wider employment market.

Delivering value is the focus. Before, the focus was to show up and follow the instructions no matter how well that served the customers.

They considered that their commitment only extended to making themselves available for work every day. They were not willing to make any promise with regard to their work, other than to be available to do what they were told.

The salary is less connected to time spent at work but to the value delivered. This led to higher productivity and higher compensation.

Can anyone work in a company like this?

In the new model, every employee needs to be entrepreneurial. Freedom and opportunity to earn more come with, as admitted, by one the employees with 'risk, responsbility and accountability'

“Sometimes it is pressurised because you are dealing with a lot of things at the same time. It can very easily get on top of you. We have all had sleepless nights.”

The question then is whether anyone is capable of working in such environment? The authors are quite explicit that old employees were resisting a lot of these changes. Especially those 'whose jobs are threatened or whose managerial importance will be diminished.' Often these people didn't find a place for themselves in the new environment and decided to leave the company.

At the same time, new graduate hires were much more receptive to this fractal model. They didn't have deeply engrained working habits and mental models about how the workplace should operate. So it was much easier for them to acclimatize to this unconventional company.

Performance management

Performance management is turned on its head in such a model. The numbers behind each virtual company speak for themselves. People who are not able to deliver based on their agreements are held accountable.

poor performance meant their colleagues looked elsewhere for a supplier, one who lived up to their promises. The rules of the internal market allowed each cell to choose where they sought internal services. Consequently, cells voted with their order books.

If someone is having a difficult month there is a system of internal loans. But they are only short-term. If bad performance is persistent and others refuse to give a loan the employee goes through 'Rescue and Recovery ' process. They need to

formulate a self-improvement plan, to identify educational needs and to submit to a much higher level of audit. When we needed to apply the policy, the operator’s income would be subsidised and upon its successful conclusion they would once again be authorised to re-join the internal market as an independent cell.

people would rarely spend long in this process. They would either quickly address the shortfalls that drew them into Rescue and Recovery, or claim the subsidised pay until they found another job.

Employee morale

The transformation affected not only tangible metrics like financial performance and quality but also the culture and employee engagement. Before the transformation

There always seemed something to complain about, sometimes bordering on the adversarial. Staff seemed to be demanding protection from the vagaries and threats of the outside world, but were not willing to respond directly to its demands and expectations.

Obedience, loyalty and dependability were valued more highly than the use of initiative.

After the transformation, people are engaged and proud.

There seemed a visible shift in demeanour which was hard to describe. People seemed to be walking taller, using more forthright language and were more confident. We didn’t understand how, but they seemed to extract extra personal meaning from their work that wasn’t there before.

The role of the company

The fractal model of the organization may also help us reframe how we think about the role of the company

The individual is the steward of the assets on their Balance Sheet and therefore they control their means of production. The financial imperative of this model is that they must provide an income for themselves, plus a surplus in return for the use of the resources. They must form contracts and make commitments, they must arrange their resources and activities such that they deliver on their commitments, satisfy their contracts and create a surplus”.

So everyone is a quasi-entrepreneur operating in a wider platform provided by the organization.

Here's how the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development report summarizes it

Unlike most traditional business models, the business acts as the supplier to the employees (for example, providing the investment, the workspace, the brand and the business management software). Such a model puts pressure on the business to deliver more efficient and effective tools, so that the employees can deliver more efficiently and effectively to their customers.

Conclusion

The only downside of the book is that it's fairly short and doesn't provide a fuller picture of how the company operates. It would be curious to see more details and examples. E.g. of how the internal pricing mechanism coordinates the production of a certain item. Also, it would be great to see RnD operates in this model.

But overall it tells an inspiring story of how market coordination allowed achieving extraordinary improvements across the board.

And it provides insight into how companies can operate in a different way.

They don't present this book as a libertarian analysis. And some of their arguments seem closer to conservative principles rather than libertarian ones ('As Jared Diamond put it: “Large populations can’t function without leaders who make the decisions, executives who carry out the decisions, and bureaucrats who administer the decisions and laws.”' 'That the Church is a conventional example of hierarchy should give us pause: the world’s oldest surviving organization, and therefore a very successful one in terms of longevity, is also very hierarchical.') 

Still, it's an insightful read about the relationship between free-market economics, the theory of the firm, and organizational theory.

What follows is less of a book review and more of my reflections ignited by the book. 

I will first summarize the main points. And then I will pose some questions which were not fully addressed in the book.

Here are the main points raised in the book

1. Production of goods and services requires coordination and cooperation

'Coordination means figuring out what should be done, by whom, when, how, and in what quantities... cooperation is about getting them to do it, even when doing so is not in everyone’s self-interest. Cooperation typically requires incentives because what is good for each of us individually may not be what is best for the group.'

2. Often market coordination is too costly (transaction costs)

'the invisible hand does not do its job costlessly. Trading can be difficult. You need to know the offerings. You have to bargain with vendors or entrepreneurs. Contracts must be made and enforced. Disputes arise. It is difficult to know the quality of many products and services.’

3. To reduce transaction costs activities are brought into companies

'The Nobel laureate Ronald Coase argued that the division of labor is often best exploited inside firms because managerial coordination can reduce the “transaction costs” of putting all these pieces together'

'conflicts between firms and outside parties (customers, suppliers, competitors, community members) are usually resolved by courts, while conflicts inside the firm are settled by the firm itself, with the board or top executives serving as a sort of supreme court.’ 

4. Unlike the market, companies are intentional. Therefore they require different, intentional direction (visible hand) to achieve coordination and cooperation 

'In markets, people are free to transact with each other; prices regulate who buys and uses the goods, services, and inputs in the economy; resources tend to flow toward the places where they are valued the highest; and entrepreneurs test new ideas and projects against the profit-and-loss test of market competition. The market isn’t a thing, or a place, or an organism, but a process'

'Companies, by contrast, are established by specific people at specific times and places for specific purposes… companies are based on (some measure of) direction and planning' 

5. A hierarchy that mandates who has authority over whom is needed to achieve coordination within companies

'Management is essential for coordinating people, resources, and tasks'

'A hierarchy is simply an arrangement in which someone holds authority over others’

'authority as the right to choose an action for another person, out of the set of that person’s possible actions’

‘Even highly competent employees are sometimes motivated to pursue their own interests rather than the company’s (what the academic literature calls a “principal-agent problem”).’

6. What works well for markets cannot work for companies

‘the fundamental misconception at the root of the bossless company narrative: that companies are essentially the same as markets. By overemphasizing flat structures, decentralization, and autonomy, the narrative suggests that all the great features of the market—exchange, competition, survival of the fitter, and so on—can be re-created inside the firm. But the forces at work inside organizations are different from those at work in markets. Pretending they are the same leads to trouble.’

These points lead to some questions

1. If not fully, can some features of the free market be partially re-created inside a firm? If so, to what degree a hierarchy will be an obstacle to that?

If markets and companies are fundamentally different does it mean no market features can be recreated in firms? Probably, not. Some free-market-leaning authors claim that we can use in companies what we learn from how markets operate. Here's, for example, Charles Koch in 'The Science of Success':

'I came to realize that there were laws that govern human well-being... It seemed to me that these laws are fundamental not only to the well-being of societies but also to the miniature societies of organizations.' 

Let's take, for example, a Hayekian concept of 'dispersed knowledge.' Hayek used it to emphasize that no central planner can collect all the data needed for economic coordination. Instead, the market process makes use of this knowledge dispersed through all the market participants. Wouldn’t the same be valid for ‘central planning’ within a firm? And if so could it be that the hierarchy may introduce some rigidity that makes it harder to tap into the dispersed knowledge within a company?

2. If companies cannot rely on market coordination it's crucial to know what exactly a company is. What is that granular entity that requires a ‘visible’ hand instead of an invisible hand?

Unfortunately I didn't find a clear explanation of what the company is. The authors themselves admit that the 'boundaries of the company can... be a bit fuzzy.' Then logically it follows that it's a bit fuzzy where we can allow market coordination and spontaneous order and where we require managerial authority and hierarchy.

Take for example, Uber which the authors mention several times. Uber coordinates taxi drivers without managerial authority over them. There is no Uber manager telling the drivers 'what should be done, by whom, when, how, and in what quantities.' Of course, there is a legal distinction between contractors and permanent employees. But from an economic point of view both these groups provide their labor to the company. So at least partially market can coordinate the labor of self-interested taxi drivers without hiearchy. 

3. What is essential about managers for coordination within a company?

It's hard to disagree that coordination and cooperation are needed to produce something. But it doesn't mean that responsibility for coordination must lie solely with one person. We all know exceptions. The simplest one: the coordination doesn’t stop when managers go on vacation

I didn’t find a persuasive argument for why peers cannot coordinate. Managers are also self-interested and prone to the principal-agent problem. So what is exactly about them that makes them better at coordinating group efforts?

One of the responsibilities of managers that the authors emphasise is monitoring:

'manager as a monitor—someone who makes sure that the right effort is expended at the right time in the right amount, that schedules are followed, and that work takes place according to the rules.'

But why a manager would be best placed to monitor others? In many cases, they won’t have the capacity to monitor everybody all the time. Also they may lack the technical expertise to assess how everybody is doing.

Authors tentatively posit that 'sometimes peer organization and peer monitoring beats supervision by middle managers.' The question then is what are the conditions that prevent that from happening consistently and sustainably?

In another place, it’s implied that only managers can react to what is happening in the environment.

'companies need managers who can recognize and act upon changes in their environments as well as manage the processes, structures, key performance indicators (KPIs), and rewards that incentivize employees to respond to these changes.'

What is so profoundly different about non-managers that they can't recognize the changes in their environment? Doesn't everyone, in a way, manage a certain scope of work, process a certain amount of information, and make certain decisions? 

In some way, it feels like a chicken and egg problem. Why managers are good at management stuff? Because only they are allowed to do it. Why are others not allowed to do it? Because they are not good at it.

4. What kind of hierarchy is needed to enable coordination and cooperation? 

Here's what Frederic Laloux writes in 'Reinventing Organizations,' one of the 'bossless narrative' books:

'Because there is no hierarchy of bosses over subordinates, space becomes available for other natural and spontaneous hierarchies to spring up—fluid hierarchies of recognition, influence, and skill'

It's not a call to eradicate hierarchy whatsoever. It's rather a call to allow a different kind of hierarchy to rise. That hierarchy will be more spontaneous (akin to how hierarchies spontaneously come about in a voluntary market). The difference is not about whether there should be a hierarchy or not. It's about what kind of hierarchy: formal or informal, top-down or bottom-up, spontaneous or fiat.

Unfortunately, I didn’t see authors addressing spontaneous hierarchies in detail. Only indirectly they refer to them negatively while discussing Valve, the video game company:

'what the sociologist Robert Michels called “the Iron Law of Oligarchy.” If there are no formal bosses, informal ones will emerge. Natural leaders arise to fill the gaps left by formal leadership structures.'

' informal structure may fill the void left by the absence of formal structure.'

This seems to be the reason why they think negatively about informal hierarchies:

‘Without well-defined roles and responsibilities, it is hard to coordinate people and tasks quickly and smoothly. Without formal rules and procedures, everything gets politicized and decision-making becomes messy and prone to conflict.‘

Traditional formal hierarchies may indeed be quicker. But politics and messy decision-making they surely do have.

Conclusion

What is great about this book? The authors provide a lot of interesting insight into organizational theory. They emphasize that cooperation and coordination are not free. 

What is the most efficient way of coordinating? According to the authors, it's a formal hierarchy with managers having authority over who does what. To them, formal managers and fiat authority are superior to peer coordination and spontaneous hierarchy.

With many good things about the book, it doesn't give fair treatment to the 'bossless narrative.' They do not address fluent and spontaneous hierarchies. And they deemphasize peer coordination and accountability.

I hope that the next edition will have more extensive quotations from the other side and more cases to explore.

The book is quite short--only 50 pages--so I decided to give it a try anyway. It consists of 30 short chapters. And most of them hardly would be relevant for people who do not run a state or country party in the US. The topics cover things like how to support party candidates, how candidates need to align their views with the party platform while answering the questions from media, how to choose a treasurer, or how to talk to your political opponents.

But still for me, it was a useful read because it helped me to refine some of my thinking. For example, the author makes some points about taking responsibility vs complaining, or about setting goals, or about delegation. All are good leadership practices but as I think about them in the context of my research here's what comes up for me. There are certain things like traits, skills, models, or tools that are the natural continuation of libertarian principles. There are some that are contradictory to libertarian principles. And there are some that are peripheral to them. They could either be good or bad practices but they are not related to libertarian principles per se. You can think of them using a two-by-two matrix.

So the underlying question here might be: what is to lead well as a libertarian as opposed to leading well in general?

And to wrap it up, even though the author draws the line between volunteers and paid employees, I think the advice related to volunteers is also relevant for paid employees. Because at the end of the day, every employee will have the option to leave your company and find a comparable position elsewhere.

Forcing an unwilling volunteer into a centrally controlled, top down command structure does not work.  Let people try their own thing and see what works.

So in general, this book could be interesting to those who plan to have a leadership role in the Libertarian Party in the US, but probably not that much to anyone else.

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Welcome!

My name is Alex Martynov. I'm a leadership coach, manager, and entrepreneur.

The main purpose of this site is to explore what libertarian leadership is like. Or in other words, what happens when someone who sticks to libertarian principles becomes a leader in an organization?

A lot is written about the implications of libertarian philosophy in politics, economics, and law in leadership studies or organizational behavior.

That seems to be like a gap worth exploring. And this is my sandbox for this inquiry.

At the moment, there will be more questions than answers around here. But hopefully, with time, some answers will be cropping up.

Here are some of these questions:

• Do libertarian principles lead to a certain leadership style and a certain form of organization? Or libertarian principles are peripheral to them?

• What are libertarian leadership best practices, if they do exists? For example, clarity of communication is something that would be beneficial no matter whether a leader is libertarian or not. But what would be a desired trait or skill specifically for a libertarian leader?

• Are there any leadership challenges that are relevant only for libertarian leaders?

As a result of this research what I would like to find out is what are the boundaries of leadership practices that distinguished libertarian leadership from non-libertarian leadership.

If you would like to chat about these matters feel free to reach out to me on Twitter or by email (alex at alexmartynov.com)

And if you want to contribute to my exploration you can fill out this survey.

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