I found this a worthwhile read. It's an interesting view of how to run a business without hierarchy, with plenty of real world examples and answers to all of those "yeah, but how do you ... ?" questions. There is one weakness however, there needs to be one leader who forces a leaderless style, because left to its own devices a group of people develops a hierarchy. All of the examples in the book had founders or leaders who forcibly did away with hierarchy, and in the examples where they left the company reverted to traditional c&c.
To be fair, the only example "where they left" is AES, where the leader was forced out by the shareholders and replaced with a more traditionally minded leader, so it's not the leader's absence which caused the reversion - or at least we can't know for sure.
The other examples don't show a leader leaving and the company reverting to traditional top-down, as far as I can remember.
