[cname]

One of the major causes of inefficiency is bad management--the cause behind many of the responses given here.

Incompetent managers up the chain don't have a coherent vision that moves us forward. They spend most of their time playing at politics, trying to look good, maintaining the status quo, and/or attempting to coalesce power/status. Even good managers get caught up in this game. It seems to be the nature of the system.

On my team, for example, we have too many projects, projects taken on for the wrong reasons, and projects that don't fit our team's skillset. Most of those projects aren't managed well or even managed at all.

Old projects molder with no real plan for fixing them, so we spend inordinate amounts of time on every change. New projects are announced with someone claiming that they'll be "easy", but there's no plan and things don't get done or they get done badly. Sometimes I sit here in pure bewilderment wondering what the point of it all is.

Is there some way a startup could tackle organizational/social issues? That seems like an interesting idea, but I can't think of how it might work.

[khaledtaha]

I believe the future of companies will be internal startups vying for investment dollars. With disruption challenging even the most traditional and stable industries, we'll think back and muse to ourselves as to how political and beauracratic we were.

That being said politics will always exist, but not the debilitating level (IMO) to which we've seen in the past.