The Traditional Workplace is Broken

I work at a job where nearly everyone could work remotely and be just as (or more) productive. This won't happen because it would be too upsetting to the way things are for the conservative people in power.

The problems I believe starts when the company is much larger. The bureaucracy kicks in and each line of management struggles to work out what they ‘control’. Large bands of like minded ‘productive’ workers congregate which is great, but large bands of ‘we don’t do much around here’ workers congregate too.

Ricardo Semler (Semco) had an interesting strategy for dealing with this that I think would be interesting to see IT shops try. He broke his company up into many autonomous cells all less than 100 employees. He also stripped the management and kept a hierarchy of only three layers.

That said, I wonder how this model works if you are running a business that employs people that may not be as smart or motivated as say the 37Signals crew or Google, which probably means most businesses.

I can see this being hard to justify...