News you want to use week 36.

Bureaucracy has few fans. Some people mean that bureaucracy saps initiative, inhibits risk taking, and crushes creativity. It’s a tax on human achievement. Though mindful of its evils, many people believe bureaucracy is unavoidable. Peter Drucker’s prediction that today’s organizations would have half as many layers and one-third as many managers as their late-1980s counterparts was woefully off the mark. Bureaucracy has been thriving. Meanwhile, productivity growth has stalled. From 1948 to 2004, U.S. labor productivity among nonfinancial firms grew by an annual average of 2.5%. Since then its growth has averaged just 1.1%. That’s no coincidence: Bureaucracy is particularly virulent in large companies. Its hard to find the perfect balance but this article from Harvard Business Review is a recommended read on the topic. Enjoy.

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