I get as excited as the next person about current trends in how work is best organized in digital companies. Those trends include egalitarianism (especially of ideas), transparency of decision-making, openness to experimentation, fact orientation, servant leadership, middle managers as player-coaches, self-organizing and self-directed teams – the list goes on.
You can immerse yourself in all those trends and lead yourself to believe that business is being reinvented. In some sense yes it is, but in the most important sense, no it’s not.
The death of companies is not imminent.[1] Top management is not going to disappear. Organizational hierarchies will continue to exist, even where flattened and energized.