Hierarchy is not the enemy
Flat organisations hide power and multiply meetings. A clear hierarchy in a small team gives people what they want: freedom to run their own work.
Miles Davis took his band into a former church on East 30th Street in New York with almost no rehearsal behind it. By the account of the pianist Bill Evans, who wrote the sleeve notes, Davis had conceived the pieces only hours earlier and arrived with sketches: some scales, some melody lines. So What, the first track, is built on two scales, and John Coltrane did what he liked with them. That session, on 2 March 1959, and a second one in April produced Kind of Blue, since certified five times platinum in America.
Nobody in that room wondered who was in charge. Davis had picked the players and brought the sketches, and inside those few lines each man played as he saw fit. That is my picture of modern leadership: one person decides, everyone knows who, and inside that clarity each person runs their own work without asking. The fashionable alternative is the flat organisation, where nobody is in charge and everything is a meeting. What it delivers is a hidden hierarchy and endless process.
The flat organisation myth
The flat organisation is sold as the cure for bad bosses. Remove the boss, the theory runs, and people will be free. What happens instead was described in 1970 by Jo Freeman, an American feminist and political scientist, in a talk on the leaderless groups of the women’s movement, later published as The Tyranny of Structurelessness. Her finding was that "there is no such thing as a structureless group". Power stays where it was and moves out of sight, and "the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few".
Business has since repeated the experiment. In 2012 the staff handbook of Valve, an American games company, became public, declaring that the firm had no management and that nobody "reports to" anybody else. A year later Jeri Ellsworth, a hardware developer whom Valve had let go, gave her side in a podcast interview. By her account there was "a hidden layer of powerful management structure" and the place "felt a lot like High School". That is one former employee’s account, and it is what Freeman would have predicted.
A flat company still has a hierarchy and declines to print it. Because nobody may decide, everything must be agreed, which takes a meeting, and then a second meeting to establish what the first one agreed. The people who thrive in this are the ones who enjoy meetings. They are seldom the ones doing the work.
Small teams, short lines
I know both sizes from the inside. As an industrial designer I worked for some of the largest manufacturers on earth, Sony and Nespresso among them. As a founder I build small companies, on purpose.
Smaller and better beats bigger, and the reason is arithmetic. Fred Brooks set it out in The Mythical Man-Month in 1975: the lines of communication in a group of n people number n(n-1)/2. Five people have ten lines between them. Fifty have 1,225.
Every one of those lines is a chance for a message to arrive late or altered. So large organisations hire people to carry messages, and then write processes to check the carriers. The person who knows should talk to the person who decides, with nobody in between to tidy things up. A small team can do that across a table, which is why small teams ship while large ones are still booking the room.
Bureaucracy is what an organisation builds once it has stopped trusting its people. Each form and each approval step records some old mistake, usually one person’s, now charged to everybody. The careless shrug it off. The able, who never needed the rule, pay for it every day in hours and patience, and they are the first to leave.
What modern leadership owes
People want responsibility and the freedom to decide how they meet it, and they want their work to be valued. Fulfilment is what those add up to. A clear hierarchy provides them, because it settles the one question that otherwise eats the day: who decides. With that answered, leadership and autonomy stop being rivals. The leader says what the job is and why it matters, then gets out of the way.
The leader’s own devotion belongs to the cause. The organisation is a tool for serving it, and so is the leader. This also settles what appreciation means. A perk programme is what companies offer in its place. Appreciation is being handed something that matters and trusted to get it right.
A clear hierarchy invites abuse of power. That is the serious case against it, and it is true. It is equally true of every arrangement that contains power, and the flat one hides the abuser as well. A named boss can be contradicted in the open and can be removed. A clique cannot, because officially it does not exist.
Freeman herself asked for specific authority to be given to named people, and for those people to be held to account. A boss who serves himself instead of the cause has given up the only claim to command he had. Smallness does the rest. In a company of twelve, a tyrant runs out of staff quickly.
The pictures in this essay were made with AI.