The Beyond Budgeting Project]:
Budgeting, as most corporations practice it, should be abolished. That may sound like a radical proposition, but it is merely the final (and decisive) action in a long running battle to change organizations from centralized hierarchies to devolved networks….
(Click images to enlarge.)
I haven’t read through all their material, but it sounds right on the face of it. Command and control in companies ultimately suffers from the same intrinsic defect that crippled centrally planned economies — what Ross Ashby called the law of requisite variety: hierarchical leadership, especially in large organizations, cannot possible match and manage the proliferating variety that ‘front line’ people inevitably encounter. The [only?] alternative: ‘autonomy in a coherent whole’ — maximal operating freedom present at the lowest (poor word, actually…) levels of the organization, support by the highest possible clarity of vision and values (see, for example, Built to Last), and the real time knowledge sharing and performance tracking systems that Bucky Fuller and Stafford Beer dreamed of, and which are now technically nearly within our grasp.
Which is what I think these folks are getting at.
(This is at issue in thinking about asymmetrical warfare as well.)
