Bureaucracy is Overrated

If Karl Marx, who coined the above quote, died in 1883, why are we still push­ing bureau­cratic organ­i­sa­tions? Inter­est­ing thought. I was recently read­ing a Q&A type post by Tom Fos­ter over at Man­age­ment Skills Blog. It was an inter­est­ing post on the chain of com­mand in tra­di­tional hier­ar­chi­cal struc­tures. It got me think­ing about the ridicu­lous nature of sta­tic, enforced hierarchy.

Tom’s got a great way of look­ing at this. You see, employ­ees aren’t sim­ply account­able only to their man­ager. They are account­able to a great num­ber of other peo­ple across the organ­i­sa­tion. Almost every­body they inter­act with, in fact.

Why can’t an employee, then, report to sev­eral super­vi­sors?  Why can’t an employee change report­ing lines as the need arises? The direct oppo­si­tion to hier­ar­chy is, iron­i­cally, the very thing that pro­vides organ­i­sa­tions with the level of flex­i­bil­ity that is the ulti­mate enabler. Every­thing is dynamic. Every­thing is evolv­ing. Peo­ple should inter­act in ways that make sense for both them­selves and the organisation.

If you’re given half a chance, look to move away from anti­quated hier­ar­chies. There’s no per­fect solu­tion, but then, there’s no per­fect organ­i­sa­tion either. Even if you are not chang­ing struc­tures, take a look at Tom’s arti­cle, it’s intriguing.