Leading for Innovation: And Organizing for Results

21.3. Streamlining the Structure

Organizations get top-heavy. It's a natural evolution. People want to be managers, and managers want to promote their protégés to managerial positions. Slowly but surely, more and more people rise to the top. The organization starts inventing new layers of management for all the new managers. The new managers start inventing self-justifying ways to oversee and interfere with the fundamental work of the organization. Before long, the organization is maintaining an army of naysayers, second-guessers, and hangers-on who aren't contributing much to the basic work and who may even be damaging it. It's a Leaning Tower of Pisa, ready to topple over.

In government, we call it the bureaucracy, but there's a bureaucracy ...