Is a Holarchy more conducive to Agile, or is just a bunch of malarkey?

 

Last year Zappos made big news by announcing that they would get rid of job titles, managers, and the infamous functional hierarchies.  For as this article from Quartz outlines:

During the 4-hour meeting, Hsieh talked about how Zappos’ traditional organizational structure is being replaced with Holacracy, a radical “self-governing” operating system where there are no job titles and no managers. The term Holacracy is derived from the Greek word holon, which means a whole that’s part of a greater whole. Instead of a top-down hierarchy, there’s a flatter “holarchy” that distributes power more evenly. The company will be made up of different circles—there will be around 400 circles at Zappos once the rollout is complete in December 2014—and employees can have any number of roles within those circles. This way, there’s no hiding under titles; radical transparency is the goal.

Rather than a traditional hierarchy compartmentalized into functional areas, a holarchy is more of a concentric circle of embedded layers, much like an onion wrapped around an individual with a specialized role.  Here’s a good illustration of a city gone holarcy:

With all the talk of Agile and its emphasis with small co-located and self-organizing teams, would this structure be more conducive for it?  A company filled with these holarchys would look similar to a “Scrum of Scrums”.

Aside from the announcement by Zappos (which was probably more of a PR stunt), I have not heard more about this onion style corporate structure, so it might all be just a bunch of malarkey!

What do you all think?