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If your organization operates as a multi-layer bureaucracy, it’s headed for extinction
Happy New Year!
Ram Charan and I co-authored an article just out in this month’s Harvard Business Review about how technology is creating the conditions for what we call the “permissionless” corporation. In it, we suggest that corporations organized like conventional bureaucracies are going to give way to organizations that have figured out new ways of working.
To explain why, let me build on another great piece about the evils of bureaucracy co-authored by Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini, called “What we Learned About Bureaucracy from 7,000 HBR Readers.”
Elements of the permissionless organization
Obviously, there is a need and essential role for leadership in any human social group — someone has to determine strategic priorities, figure out who is supposed to do what and provide guidance as to goals. What we suggest in our article, however, is that many of the bureaucratic tasks of reporting, giving assignments, collecting status updates and providing metrics are now able to be handled by technology with far more speed and accuracy than by using conventional management methods.
A ’permissionless’ organization, therefore, is one in which groups that have all the essential functional skills…
