Bureaucracies and Hierarchies

Bureaucracies and hierarchies are equally terrible.
The failure of the bureaucracy is that  getting anything done becomes impeded and mired in the importance of doing it "correctly".  And trying to do anything which is not your particular pigeon hole at best creates offense and worst creates a turf war with infighting over perceived insults and the threat of punitive actions.  Initiative becomes stifled and opportunity leaves, seeking friendlier shores.

The failure of the hierarchy is that the structure becomes more important that what is trying to be accomplished.    Ability to act and ability to make decisions are removed from the individual, replaced by the need to ask for permission to act.  Often in hierarchies the dictum is pronounced to "Take Action", yet if that action is not sanctioned by someone higher up the chain the decision and the individual become questionable or rogue.   The form becomes more important that what the form is meant to accomplish.

In reality such things are needed in some fashion:  without a bureaucracy of some kind very little would get co-ordinated or tracked for groups and without a hierarchy of some kind groups becomes a seething mass of humanity surging back and forth in their decision making (for a fine example of an essentially flat hierarchy gone totally wrong, review the history of Athens during the Peloponnesian War).  The problem, whether it is in business or politics or even in our relationships, is that we forget that these things are meant for the purpose of getting things done and instead become more interested in the forms that are being used to accomplish them.  At this point the forms acquire a life of their own and the actions become subservient to them.  Ultimately (as history shows) such systems are doomed to fail as the centers of planning action move far from the bureaucracies and hierarchies, leaving them to bury themselves under their own weight.

They are tools to accomplish tasks, as any hammer or computer is.  We forget this to our peril.