The Flattening of Almost Everything

Tom Evslin has a great post on the Flattening of Organizations.  I think he's dead on.  The Open Source movements, are flat almost by definition and they tend to be quite effective.  I wonder if this is resonating with the business academics...are they training a new generation of managers to think differently about organizational hierarchies?

Comments

[Patrizia]

Hierarchies are intrinsec in nature.
Men are different.

"When man had reached the stage of of clothing, and overcoming the danger of starving, freezing and being eaten by wild animals and these dangers ceased to be the essential factor influencing selection, an evil intra specific selection must have set in.
The factor influencing selection was now the wars between hostile neighbouring tribes and among the people belonging to the same tribe."

And hierarchies are a consequence of them.
You can create all the flat organizations you like, but after a while a hierarchy will naturally grow into them.

Patrizia
http://woip.blogspot.com
http://www.worldonip.com

[Rags]

I don't argue with that. I'm not advocating organizations to have 1 or 2 layers; it would be impractical, almost anarchical to have this happen. But they should nonetheless become less rigid and flatter. I wonder how apian hierarchies work...