When the Monkeys Run the Zoo: The Pitfalls of Flat Hierarchies

by Stefan Kühl

Overview

Every change takes its toll. Stefan Kühl critically examines the blind enthusiasm that continues to celebrate the leveling of hierarchies and the decentralization of organizations. Relying on studies performed in European and U.S. companies, Kühl describes why these management concepts can carry organizations to the edge of extinction. Organizations are facing the challenge of coming to grips with the threat of losing their identity, ever-escalating complexity, and the power struggles that result from both.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780999147900
Publisher:	Metaplan
Publication date:	09/01/2017
Series:	Challenges of New Organizational Forms , #1
Pages:	154
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 1.25(h) x 9.00(d)

Table of Contents

On Trumpets, Pyramids, and Onions – Foreword

1. Monkeys, Revolutions, and Post-bureaucratic Organizations

2. The Limits of Bureaucratic-hierarchical Organizations

2.1 Organizations and their Preference for Certainty

2.2 Taylorism and Bureaucracy: The Victory of Eternal Repetition

2.3 Why Things Can’t Go On Like This – Reasons for a Fundamental Organizational Transformation

3. Change Above All Else – The New Revolutionary Organizations

3.1 New Relations Between Environment and Organization

3.2 The Guts of Post-bureaucratic Organizations

3.3 The Structure of Post-bureaucratic Organizations

4. The Dilemmas of Post-bureaucratic Organizations

4.1 The Identity Dilemma: The (Necessary) Limits of Organizations

4.2 The Politicization Dilemma: Power Struggles in Post-bureaucratic Organizations

4.3 The Complexity Dilemma: Simplification Strategies That Make Things More Complicated

5. Beyond Hierarchy and Anarchy

5.1 Can We Escape the Dilemma? Management at the Edge of Chaos

5.2 The Search Strategies of Post-bureaucratic Organizations

5.3 We Are Only at the Beginning – Looking Forward

Afterword on methodology