Richard M. Burton, Dorthe Døjbak Håkonsson, Jackson Nickerson, Phanish Puranam, Maciej Workiewicz, Todd Zenger
In this edition of the organizational zoo series, we take a closer look at an interesting organization design case—GitHub, a software company from California. Similar to Valve, the subject of the previous article in the series (Puranam and Håkonsson, J Organ Design 4: 2–4, 2015) GitHub is used to delegate the choice of projects and project allocation to its workers, fitting the recent trend in running organizations without bosses. The interesting fact about GitHub is that after years of praising its own unorthodox organizational structure, the company suddenly decided to abandon it for something much more traditional. We asked several renowned organization scientists to share their thoughts on this interesting case and discuss what we can learn from it. © 2017, The Author(s).
Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, 100 Fuqua Drive, Box 90120, Durham, 27708-0120, NC, United States; Interdisciplinary Center for Organizational Architecture, Aarhus University, Fuglesangs Allé 20, Aarhus V, DK-8210, Denmark; Olin Business School, Washington University in St. Louis, Snow Way, 1 Brookings Drive, St. Louis, 63130, MO, United States; INSEAD, 1 Ayer Rajah Avenue, Singapore, 138676, Singapore; ESSEC Business School, 3 Ave Bernard Hirsch, Cergy, 95000, France; University of Utah, 1655 Campus Center Dr, Salt Lake City, 84112, UT, United States
