In July 2001, Google had several hundred employees and a new advertising product, AdWords, that would soon make it rich. Its engineers worked under Wayne Rosing, who had joined six months earlier. Rosing wasn’t happy with his managers. Strong engineers, he thought. Not great managers.
He took the problem to Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and they came up with an answer that Rosing and Eric Schmidt nicknamed the “disorg.” Every manager in engineering would go. All the engineers would report straight to Rosing.
The founders were delighted. Neither had worked in a conventional company. They preferred the way a university runs: students gather around a project, often with an adviser, and nobody is “managed.” Why put someone between the company and the people doing the work?
Around then, the executive coach Bill Campbell started working with Google. One evening he told Page, “we have to get some managers in here.” Page wasn’t persuaded. He had just got rid of them.
So Campbell, Page and Brin walked down the hall and found some engineers at work. Campbell asked one of them whether he wanted a manager.
Yes, the engineer said.
Why?
“I want someone I can learn from, and someone to break ties.”
They talked to several more engineers that night. Most said much the same.
The founders still took a while to come round. By the account in Trillion Dollar Coach, the disorg lasted more than a year, and managers came back near the end of 2002. Harvard Business Review, which dates the experiment to 2002 and says it lasted only a few months, gives the reason it ended: too many people were going directly to Page “with questions about expense reports, interpersonal conflicts, and other nitty-gritty issues.”