The system worked because it was designed to ensure that each of its members had the information he needed to do his job.

The best example of a large and successful information-based organization, and one without any middle management at all, was the British civil administration in India. The British ran the Indian subcontinent for two hundred years, from the middle of the eighteenth century through World War II. The Indian civil service never had more than one thousand members to administer the vast and densely populated subcontinent. Most of the Britishers lived alone in isolated outposts with their nearest countryman a day or two of travel away, and for the first hundred years there ...

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