Most large organizations are hugely bureucratic regardless of whether they are successful or not :-)
In any case the prompt for the thread is somebody mentioning their (subjective) view that the deep hiearachy they were operating under, made a "wrong call".
We'll never know if this true or not, but it points to the challenges for this type of organizational structure faces. Dynamics in remote layers floating somewhere "above your level" decide the fate of things. Aspects that may have little to do with any meritocracy, reasonableness, fairness etc. become the deciding factors...
There have been countless proposals for alternative systems. Last-in, first-out from memory is holacracy [1] "Holacracy is a method of decentralized management and organizational governance, which claims to distribute authority and decision-making through a holarchy of self-organizing teams rather than being vested in a management hierarchy".
Not sure there has been an opportunity to objectively test what are the pros and cons of all the possibilities. The mix of historical happenstance, vested interests, ideology, expedience, habit etc. that determines what is actually happening does not leave much room for observing alternatives.
In any case the prompt for the thread is somebody mentioning their (subjective) view that the deep hiearachy they were operating under, made a "wrong call".
We'll never know if this true or not, but it points to the challenges for this type of organizational structure faces. Dynamics in remote layers floating somewhere "above your level" decide the fate of things. Aspects that may have little to do with any meritocracy, reasonableness, fairness etc. become the deciding factors...