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Company and a leader in the firm’s organization, strategy, and financial services practices. Zanini’s work has been featured in the Harvard Business Review, the Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal. In this Big Interview with People Matters, Gary and Michele, acclaimed business thinkers detail how to bust bureaucracy and harness the everyday genius of workers. Read on to learn more about how to flatten
If you want to build organizations that can succeed in a world of hyperconnected change and unprecedented challenges, we will have to be quite intentional in dismantling bureaucracy or building something better in its place the organizational hierarchy, distribute power, and unleash the “everyday genius” of every human being at work; and how struggling organizations can stay resilient in difficult times.
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the world like never before with more than 38.9Mn confirmed cases, as of October 16, 2020, globally, and more than 1.1Mn people known to have died. On the other hand, 22
the crisis has also impacted businesses like never before. How do you see the larger picture of this crisis? Gary: For sure, COVID19 is the most demanding test for individual and organizational resilience in our lifetimes. And not surprisingly, a lot of large bureaucratic organizations have struggled to respond to the crisis. An Italian health care leader said about the crisis, that the virus moves faster than our bureau-
| november 2020
cracy and that’s a fact. What we saw was a typical response to a large crisis. In a small crisis, power tends to move towards the center, but in a large crisis, power moves towards the periphery and this is what we have seen with this pandemic. It is important to note that COVID-19 is not the only unprecedented challenge we faced as a species; we are also facing climate change, income inequality, social injustice, declining productivity growth, geopolitical
threats, and the job displacing impact of automation. And so, against those challenges, we need to mobilize qualities of human initiative and imagination and unfortunately, that is almost impossible in bureaucratic structures. Bureaucracies turned human beings into semi-programmable robots, they demand compliance, they are innovation phobic and they are very slow to change. We have seen through the crisis how human beings at all levels of society are doing what bureaucracies can’t – forming these spontaneous horizontal networks, experimenting locally, combining their knowledge, and trying to deal with the problem. Now, you might hope that as we come out of the crisis, CEOs and other leaders would recognize all of this and want to harness that and support that. But, history says otherwise. Typically, as a crisis wanes, power moves back to the center as bureaucrats, ever jealous of their power, seek to reassert their authority. That’s what happened after the financial crisis of 2008-09. So, I think that will happen again this time and unfortunately, COVID-19 has been lethal for hundreds of thousands of human beings but will not be lethal for bureaucracy. If you want to build organizations that