Valve's games - which include the Half-Life, Portal, Dota and Left 4 Dead series - are famed for both their quality and high sales.

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Or as the handbook puts it: "Of all the people at this company who aren't your boss, Gabe is the MOST not your boss, if you get what we're saying."

"But as soon as resources become more scarce, then competition increases, which creates conflicts, which creates tensions, which creates hierarchies, which creates concern about relative positioning."

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"It's a community of respect and the best idea wins no matter who it comes from, whether they've been at Valve for a year or founded Valve."

"But unless you can find like minded people to work with, you will struggle to get enough resources you need to get it done."

"We travel together once a year and it's fun," he says. "Valve's really a family atmosphere in a lot of ways and that gives us an opportunity for our [own] families to get know each other even better."

"That's how we got to a company working effectively for a long period of time under this structure - because it was designed from the beginning."

"I think the fact that we're not managed by people and we're not managing people and you're able to formulate your own ideas and work with whoever it is to come up with a project or feature - that's empowering," he says.

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The video games developer caused a stir when a handbook detailing its unusual structure, external leaked onto the web last year. Now, in a rare interview, it discusses its inner-workings.

Mr Powers would not discuss the event, but when the Verge news site interviewed, external two of the laid-off employees they appeared to still be on good terms with the company, revealing they had been allowed to retain the intellectual rights to the project they had been working on.

Although Valve's record suggests the system can work, Prof Oswick warns that it could go awry were the firm to face a financial setback.

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The company regularly flies all 300-plus members of staff and their families to a tropical resort, most recently Hawaii.

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Traditional management consultants might shudder at the implications, but Prof Cliff Oswick from Cass Business school - who has studied other experiments in what he calls "non-leadership" - commends the model.

While other firms have fixed layouts, the workstations at the Bellevue, Washington-based company are fitted with wheels.

Staff working on the same project rank each others' technical skills, productivity, team-playing abilities and other contributions.

One might think the firm's set-up is a recipe for its staff to career off to their own personal passion projects. So how do its complex products ever emerge?

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"It doesn't work because we have the 1% of the 1%, or however you put that. It works because it was the original philosophy.

And at a firm which says picking who else to hire is its workers' most important task - it describes the activity as "more important than breathing" - there's an acknowledgement that many talented individuals will not fit in.

The idea of spending free-time with workmates might sound like a nightmare to some, but Mr Powers says it is something that he and the others genuinely look forward to.

Other companies might blanche at such ideas - and Mr Powers acknowledges it would be a bad idea to retrofit Valve's model to existing businesses - but he indicates there are lessons for start-ups.

"The ability to be able to pick up and move and be in another office in 20 minutes as opposed to a day-and-a-half is really attractive.

"People ask you questions about what you are working on. And the response is not to get defensive but to have that conversation and make sure that we're all invested in each other."

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Then there's the fact that when a firm without bosses dismisses staff it attracts attention. A decision to let about two dozen workers go in February made headlines across the tech press.

Imagine a company where everyone is equal and managers don't exist. A place where employees sit where they want, choose what to work on and decide each other's pay. Then, once a year, everyone goes on holiday together.

"We're a flat organisation, so I don't report to anybody and people don't report to me," explains DJ Powers, speaking to the BBC on the sidelines of Edinburgh's Turing Festival.