It’s fashionable these days to rail against the hierarchical organization. Business pundits frequently claim the age of hierarchy is over. They claim to have developed exciting alternatives, which they’ll sell you for a small fee.

Uh … no. Far from being dead, hierarchical organizational design continues to be inevitable for all but the smallest organizations, and for a very simple reason: There’s no other way to sort out who ought to be responsible for what when coordinating the efforts of a lot of people.