Running a Company without Managers?

Stumbled into a Blog post about a 20 people IT company with NO manager today. The company has a flat structure and each employee owns a part of the company. Whenever a decision needs to be made, everybody got involved and volunteered to do the work.

Quote from the blog:

The advantages of this model are:

• Ownership. Everyone is as involved as they want to be. No one is sulking because a decision was made over their head.
• Motivation. People are insanely motivated, because they’re a part of running the company - they don’t just work there.
• Implementing decisions. Because people are involved in making decisions, it becomes much easier to implement them. You don’t have to sell decisions to reluctant employees.

The disadvantages are:

• Time. Sometimes it takes time to arrive at a decision. This was never a problem for us, but if your business climate requires constant quick leadership decisions, this may not be the right model.
• Petty discussions. If you’re not careful, meetings can devolve into endless, petty talk about mindless minutiae. In this case it’s important to stop and delegate or to trust someone who cares to make a good decision.

This is certainly an interesting idea, but I don't think too many companies could be this democratic. After all, the % stake are different for each person. And the process certainly will have to be changed when the company grows bigger. Nevertheless, I really like the idea of self-motivation.