Lessons from Valve: Why Your Next Startup Should Be Flat

If you’re in the process of organizing a group of people around a common purpose, I’d highly recommend skimming through the employee handbook at Valve before assigning yourself or your team members a role.

Valve is the gaming juggernaut behind Steam, and games like Portal, Half-Life, and Counter-Strike.

Some key takeaways:

Structure

Hierarchy is great for maintaining predictability and repeatability. It simplifies planning and makes it easier to control a large group of people from the top down, which is why military organizations rely on it so heavily.
But when you’re an entertainment company that’s spent the last decade going out of its way to recruit the most intelligent, innovative, talented people on Earth, telling them to sit at a desk and do what they’re told obliterates 99 percent of their value. We want innovators, and that means maintaining an environment where they’ll...