So rather than have presidents, vice presidents and managers, all employees had an equal say in running the company. This was backed up by the fact that all employees were also co-owners, every new hire being offered a stake in the company after six months on the job. While I and my two co-founders retained a majority of the shares, this gave us no greater power in making day-to-day decisions.

So how did we make decisions? We had two major structures in place:
Areas of responsibility
We sat down and made a list of all the categories of tasks we had in the company. Sales, finance, intranet, our website, personnel, etc. There were around 20 in all. Then instead of appointing managers responsible for each of these, we asked who in the company would like to do it, and let people choose for themselves where they wanted to be involved. Interestingly, everyone signed up for at least a couple of these and every single task got at least one person assigned to it.

The result was that all these tasks were done by people who liked doing it - and who therefore invariably did a great job.

The people who took on such an area of responsibility were responsible for making a lost of all tasks, for making a budget if required and for making sure that everything worked as it should.