Book review: Better work together

A few weeks ago I finished a really good technical book called Better work together. The book is written by people from enspiral about working together in non-hierarchical structures and the lessons learned from doing this within enspiral. I was lucky to meet a few of the authors at the network convergence retreat I attended last year.

The book is written as a bunch of essays and reflections by a range of authors, instead of a single author, very much inline with the books theme. This includes great stories, such as the ones from Susan and Kate, but also deep thoughts about growing distributed leadership by Alanna and musings on consensus by Richard. Also thoughts on how to value the commons and the things you can’t (and probably shouldn’t measure).

It was interesting to hear the ways in which enspiral has envolved over time. It is both a collection of great individuals, but also a collection of coops or livelyhood pods and companies. Enspiral as I see it, is a shared brand for these, and this is where I find a tension as that puts a lot of pressure to align, almost top-down a bit like a political party. Instead of doing it bottom up, where the individual companies are the main focus. Maybe it is just the way the story is presented, but that is both impression from talking to people and from reading the book.

That being said, it is probably the best book about running a non-hierarchical organization I have read since The Seven-Day Weekend by Ricardo Semler. Highly recommended.