Pundits Love To Blame Bureaucracy. Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Listen To Them:
When Bill Anderson joined Bayer last June, he knew that the 160-year old firm had its challenges. In addition to high debt and expensive litigation involving the herbicide Roundup, the firm also faces a slew of patent expirations and a faltering development pipeline for new drugs.
Yet Anderson has his eyes set on even a more menacing bugbear. “Bureaucracy has put Bayer in a stranglehold,” he recently wrote in Fortune. “Our internal rules for employees span 1,362 pages. We have excellent people…but they are trapped in 12 levels of hierarchy, which puts unnecessary distance between our teams, our customers, and our products.”
I’m skeptical. While pointing to a nameless, amorphous bureaucracy as the source of all evil may be convenient, it’s not at all clear to me that it’s evidence of a strategy. In fact, middle management is often crucial to enabling organizations to function, playing critical roles in helping to coordinate and execute complex tasks. We need to be careful what we cut.
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