I think a lot of these 'eliminate the boss' people ought to read The Tyranny of Structurelessness (<a href="http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm</a>). It's an article whose basic premise is that if you eliminate explicit hierarchies, social groups will tend to instead develop <i>implicit</i> ones, which are more difficult to challenge because they ostensibly don't exist.