I've been at hugely decentralized companies (several thousand engineers, one level of management between me as team lead and the actual executives). Each team was fully empowered to solve their problems in the best manner and they went off and did it. It had downsides. In particular, teams often encountered similar problems, and each team solved that problem differently. There was no one in a position to see that Team A and Team D were both solving problem theta, and that Team D's solution was better, and Team A should just use Team D's (or, more often, that we needed to detail an engineer to solve problem theta fully and get both teams to use that full solution rather than the jury-rig that each team had built). There was also no one to keep us informed that Team Ssang-giyeok had already solved the issue months ago and we could just use their solution.
Internal communications like that are a scale problem: in a small company, the matrix of personal relationships is basically full, but as companies get larger, the matrix gets sparser and sparser. By the time you have a 100,000 employees in time zones all over the world your matrix is almost all 0's with only occasional 1s. And so information will travel quite poorly without people whose explicit tasks are to convey information to the right people. That's what managers and internal bureaucracy are supposed to do. Sometimes that information is "we need to build this and not that," sometimes it's "employee 24601 is great and should be given more responsibility," sometimes it's "this project is a Kafkaesque nightmare of un-ending pain that will never be delivered as scoped." But identifying this information and sharing it with the correct other people- that's what middle-management is supposed to do.
Believe me, I am not generally a fan of bureaucracy (as I type this I'm supposed to be fixing a problem that is somewhere in the interface between my 100k employee company and another 100k+ employee company, and it's goddamn terrible), but it does have value beyond just fief-building.
Internal communications like that are a scale problem: in a small company, the matrix of personal relationships is basically full, but as companies get larger, the matrix gets sparser and sparser. By the time you have a 100,000 employees in time zones all over the world your matrix is almost all 0's with only occasional 1s. And so information will travel quite poorly without people whose explicit tasks are to convey information to the right people. That's what managers and internal bureaucracy are supposed to do. Sometimes that information is "we need to build this and not that," sometimes it's "employee 24601 is great and should be given more responsibility," sometimes it's "this project is a Kafkaesque nightmare of un-ending pain that will never be delivered as scoped." But identifying this information and sharing it with the correct other people- that's what middle-management is supposed to do.
Believe me, I am not generally a fan of bureaucracy (as I type this I'm supposed to be fixing a problem that is somewhere in the interface between my 100k employee company and another 100k+ employee company, and it's goddamn terrible), but it does have value beyond just fief-building.