The system worked because it was designed to ensure that each of its members had the information he needed to do his job.
The best example of a large and successful information-based organization, and one without any middle management at all, was the British civil administration in India. The British ran the Indian subcontinent for two hundred years, from the middle of the eighteenth century through World War II. The Indian civil service never had more than one thousand members to administer the vast and densely populated subcontinent. Most of the Britishers lived alone in isolated outposts with their nearest countryman a day or two of travel away, and for the first hundred years there was no telegraph or railroad.
The organization structure was totally flat. Each district officer reported directly to the “COO,” the provincial political secretary. And since there were nine provinces, each political secretary had at least one hundred people reporting directly to him. Each month the district officer spent a whole day writing a full report to the political secretary in the provincial capital. He discussed each of his principal tasks. He put down in detail what he had expected would happen with respect to each of them, what actually did happen, and why, if there was a discrepancy, the two differed. Then he wrote down what he expected would happen in the ensuing month with respect to each key task and what he was going to do about it, asked questions about policy, and commented on long-term opportunities, threats, and needs. In turn, the political secretary wrote back a full comment.
ACTION POINT: Reflect on any similarities between your organization and the British civil administration in India.
The Ecological Vision
* Source: The Daily Drucker by Peter F. Drucker