Nice recap. I had a friend who worked as a sales guy for Gore (his company was acquired by them). He said that he couldn't "order" anyone to do anything for him, so he had to spend all his time sucking up to people just to get any needed support.

Is that a problem with the company or with your friend? A lot of people really just seem to want the power to boss others around.

Good point. I think it was the organization. In a large organization, you can't do everything yourself. "Can I get last year's sales figures for client A?" "When I get around to it." "I'm meeting with them next week." "Sorry, I'm busy."

See Bane's comments above for a good recap.

It sounds pretty similar to most large organisations. In particular:

"Now instead of getting work done, people will dedicate their time to internal politics and jostling for group position"

Internal politics and jostling for group position happens in every large organisation I have worked at.

"unresolved because nobody could assume the role of dictator and push through needed work prioritization schedules"

Again, at every large company I have worked for the "dictators" of successful projects were rarely the people with official ownership of the projects or people high up in the org chart. So I'm not sure why nobody could assume the role of dictator.

One of the things that formal organizational structures provide is a set of tools you can use to fix logjams when consensus-building isn't possible.

By building an organization only on de-facto group dynamics, you toss away all of those tools and you have literally no option but to play along with these informal processes.

One of the few things modern management practice has identified for success is that informal processes need to be brought under some semblance of organizational control or they become incestuous and optimize for local efficiencies rather than enabling the entire organization to be successful.

>Again, at every large company I have worked for the "dictators" of successful projects were rarely the people with official ownership of the projects or people high up in the org chart. So I'm not sure why nobody could assume the role of dictator.

Here's how this works in flat organizations

employee a: I need you to do this

employee b: no

and that's the end of the story. Sometimes, if the organization is setup according to some kind of flat org theory you'll get these steps also

employee a: well I'm going to take this to committee

employee b: ok

<months pass, committee meets>

employee a: I told employee b to do the thing and he said "no"

employee b: employee a was acting like my boss and we're flat, I didn't feel the need to give into his demands (committee members nod in assent)

committee: we've decided that employee b does not, in fact, need to do the thing

and now the thing doesn't get done

Here's how it works in a grown-up organization

employee a: I need you do this

employee b: no

employee a: boss, I need b to do this for <business reasons>

boss: employee b, do the thing

employee b: no

boss: rethink that

employee b: okay, I'll do it

souls are crushed, free will is diminished, but the thing gets done and the company moves on

However, more importantly, many so called "flat" organizations are not, either formally or informally. Informally they'll all succumb to informal group behavior that all humans exhibit in groups of more than 1. Formally, they'll all have some kind of hierarchy, but will attempt to hide it or obfuscate it in some way. This is usually tested trivially by offering to swap a low-level employee with a high-level one and seeing if it actually happens (hint it almost never will)

Ok then, the 'flat' organization devolves into a hierarchical one where you have to ferret out the real structure (or guess). So that a/b scenario never happens, even in the flat company.

Except the structure in a flat organization is all ad-hoc, there's no teeth behind it. Just because Joe in accounting talks loud and operates with charisma doesn't give him dictatorial powers backed by "do it or you're fired" powers.

It also means that when shit goes wrong, there's no "buck stops here" person who's ultimately responsible. Joe can always argue that he's just a member of a committee and defer responsibility to everybody else, and use his charisma (and probably a backlog of favor trading) to scapegoat somebody else.

The most important thing is that all this is a distraction from the business of the company. All this time that Joe has to invest in gathering and cultivating meaningless power that he shouldn't have, and putting in place an invisible power structure that everybody around him has to navigate...could better be spent doing, I dunno, accounting perhaps?

Flat structures tend to work only when organizations are very small, or can be compartmentalized into very small groups, but there's tacit acknowledgement that even in those cases there needs to be a formal dictator to make sure the ball is moving forward and people aren't wasting time in power brokering exercises. When the organizations get large, it becomes a necessity.

Peer groups define fashion, not progress.