The Leaderless Organization (2012)
Humans are not fundamentally autonomous. Even expert humans do not individually know enough to go into depth about how complex systems work (they typically know one layer of abstraction in great detail). Humans are terrible at assessing reality. They are bad at prioritising. They are lousy learners.<p>Leaders are a short circuit around all that by just telling people what to do, no arguments. If your organisation is small enough that everyone can be brilliant and busy, great, good luck, might work. But even then technical people often appreciate some leadership to reduce the mental load and let them focus on how rather than what and why.<p>I doubt there are leaderless organisations. There are organisations that purposefully hide their leadership and those that do not. And yes, big management layers are bad. The managers have the same problems as everyone else - humans are limited. If there are lots of managers they can&#x27;t all be above average and then the basic human problems they were meant to solve come back.