Hamel and Zanini on The End of Bureaucracy

The world-renowned management theorist Gary Hamel and his collaborator Michele Zanini published a magisterial analysis of the huge innovations at Haier over the past decade by ‘renegade CEO’ Zhang Ruimin. In The End of Bureaucracy, the authors provide perhaps the single best synopsis of Haier’s revolution from an organizational structure and development perspective, with an admixture of Hamel’s bête noire: bureaucracy. The authors make a strong case for the damage that bureaucratic management has made, starting with our inclination to accept it as a necessary evil:

Though mindful of its evils, many people believe bureaucracy is unavoidable. [CEO of JPMorgan Chase Jamie] Dimon remembers an outside adviser who defended it as the “necessary outcome of complex businesses operating in complex international and regulatory environments.” Indeed, since 1983 the number of managers, supervisors, and administrators in the U.S. workforce has grown by more than 100%, while the number of people in all other occupations has increased by just 44%. In a survey by Harvard Business Review, nearly two-thirds of respondents said…