Growing Under Bureaucracy

How do we better navigate bureaucracy and organizational growth?

While most business leaders recognize that bureaucracy squashes initiative, risk taking, and creativity, it continues to thrive. In a complex global environment, it’s seen as a necessary coping mechanism.

It was a necessary outcome of complex businesses operating in complex international and regulatory environments.

Does it mean that productivity growth has to stall? With its clear lines of authority, specialized units, and standardized tasks, bureaucracy facilitates efficiency at scale. It’s also comfortably familiar, varying little across industries, cultures, and political systems.

Today’s employees are skilled, not illiterate; competitive advantage comes from innovation, not sheer size; communication is instantaneous, not tortuous; and the pace of change is hypersonic, not glacial.

How does one bridge the operations of bureaucracy and skilled workers to create innovation and exponential growth of an organization?