Can We Finally Kill The Idea Of Leaderless Organizations?
About a decade ago, the management guru Gary Hamel wrote a highly cited article in Harvard Business Review entitled First, Let’s Fire All the Managers. He analyzed the success of Morningstar, a leading manufacturer of tomato products that operates with a flat management structure and called for other corporations to follow its lead.
“A hierarchy of managers exacts a hefty tax on any organization,” he wrote. “This levy comes in several forms. First, managers add overhead and, as an organization grows, the costs of management rise in both absolute and relative terms.” The article was created a lot of buzz and helped bolster other flat models, such as Holacracy.
Yet the “flat organization” idea hasn’t caught on. “Since 1983, the size of the bureaucratic class — the number of managers and administrators in the US workforce — has more than doubled, while employment in other categories has grown by only 40%,” Hamil recently wrote. The truth is that we need managers and trying to eliminate them is a waste of time.
Planning A Spontaneous Revolution
In the early 2000s, a series of color revolutions spread across Eastern Europe sweeping away the authoritarian remnants of post-communist governments in Serbia, the Georgian Republic and Ukraine. These would…
