Two years ago, Chris Wanstrath gathered the employees of his software startup GitHub into a meeting to notify them of a major change: They were all getting bosses.
When Wanstrath and his co-founders started GitHub in 2008, they were adamant that they use a flat corporate structure without managers or titles. GitHub quickly became an essential tool for software developers to share their code and collaborate on projects, and its creators gave part of the credit for that success to their nontraditional work culture. Although the founders took “fluidly” defined roles of president and chief executive officer, they said the otherwise lack of structure allowed workers to pursue their own ideas and congregate around whichever ones interested them most.
