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Get Better at Flatter: A Guide to Shaping and Leading Organizations with Less Hierarchy
When should organizations think about adopting a flat structure? And what does it take to make it work? Is it even the silver bullet that we’ve been told it is? Often we have heard about how businesses should organize in non-traditional ways to succeed in today’s be ‘agile’, or adopt approaches such as ‘holacracy,’ ‘RenDanHeYi’ or ‘scrum’. But what do these concepts actually mean? Are they even helping us to custom-tailor flat structures to our needs? Leading expert, Markus Reitzig, provides a no-holds barred account of flat organizational structures, taking the good with the bad and asking the reader to balance the opportunities and challenges that come with less hierarchical structures. He explains that there are many types of flat organizations, and that they may only be better than traditional companies in some instances, and only when the company picks the right structure given its goal and its people. Taking an evidence-based approach to the advantages and disadvantages of decentralizing, this book offers a unique, practical guide for managers. You’ll learn how to formulate realistic goals with fewer hierarchical layers, where to decentralize, whom to recruit and how to treat your staff. This is an indispensable guide for anyone who wants to figure out how to work with flat organizational structures, and whether ‘flat’ may even be right for them.
234 pages, Hardcover
Published January 22, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review
August 21, 2026
My rating: 4/5, with caveats
Overall, this book is a useful counterweight to the often overly rosy view of decentralized organizations in many books on the topic. Those books are not wrong, but this book takes a more balanced view of when and why decentralization is valuable, as well as the costs. Hierarchies exist for a reason, and removing managers does not make the work of management disappear; it simply moves that work somewhere else.
Flattening should follow from the organization’s goals rather than being an objective in itself. Flat structures can help improve creativity, respond quickly to local conditions, make better use of distributed information, or attract and retain people who value autonomy. But they are not universally superior. As organizations grow, the costs of information exchange and coordination increase, and some forms of hierarchy may become useful again. The question is not simply hierarchy versus no hierarchy, but which kinds of authority and coordination are needed for the work.
The book’s most useful conceptual tool is the “4+1” framework for unbundling management. Management traditionally involves five different problems: task division (what work should exist?), task allocation (who should do it?), reward distribution (who gets what?), information exchange (who needs to know what?), and exception management (what happens when the normal system breaks down?). These functions do not all need to be decentralized together. E.g., an organization might allow employees to choose which projects to work on while keeping rewards and performance evaluation relatively centralized. There is no single “flat organization”. It's a design space of decision rights.
Flattening is not the same as simply removing layers from an org chart. Genuine flattening requires decentralizing decision rights and ensuring that employees can actually exercise them. That requires the right people, enough information, and systems of self-organization. But autonomy also creates additional work for employees. Why would employees take this on? Autonomy can motivate people. That's the big payoff that makes all this worthwhile. Still, we can't confuse autonomy and anarchy. Flat structures need accountability, support, transparent information, and mechanisms for resolving conflicts and exceptions.
So… now the downside. This book actually says relatively little. It’s also rather dry. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. There's a place for books that say little but do so in a well founded way. But it does mean that if you’re looking for a practical “field guide” to flattening, this gives you the right questions to ask about decision rights, capability, information, coordination, and accountability, but doesn’t always offer concrete answers.
In the end, I recommend this book as a complement to other books on decentralization—such as Reinventing Organizations—and not as a standalone guide or motivational text. Its main contribution is to make the case for a more sober and specific approach: don’t start by deciding that you want to be flat. Start with the work you need to do, identify which decisions benefit from being closer to the people with the relevant information, and then design the organization around that.
Overall, this book is a useful counterweight to the often overly rosy view of decentralized organizations in many books on the topic. Those books are not wrong, but this book takes a more balanced view of when and why decentralization is valuable, as well as the costs. Hierarchies exist for a reason, and removing managers does not make the work of management disappear; it simply moves that work somewhere else.
Flattening should follow from the organization’s goals rather than being an objective in itself. Flat structures can help improve creativity, respond quickly to local conditions, make better use of distributed information, or attract and retain people who value autonomy. But they are not universally superior. As organizations grow, the costs of information exchange and coordination increase, and some forms of hierarchy may become useful again. The question is not simply hierarchy versus no hierarchy, but which kinds of authority and coordination are needed for the work.
The book’s most useful conceptual tool is the “4+1” framework for unbundling management. Management traditionally involves five different problems: task division (what work should exist?), task allocation (who should do it?), reward distribution (who gets what?), information exchange (who needs to know what?), and exception management (what happens when the normal system breaks down?). These functions do not all need to be decentralized together. E.g., an organization might allow employees to choose which projects to work on while keeping rewards and performance evaluation relatively centralized. There is no single “flat organization”. It's a design space of decision rights.
Flattening is not the same as simply removing layers from an org chart. Genuine flattening requires decentralizing decision rights and ensuring that employees can actually exercise them. That requires the right people, enough information, and systems of self-organization. But autonomy also creates additional work for employees. Why would employees take this on? Autonomy can motivate people. That's the big payoff that makes all this worthwhile. Still, we can't confuse autonomy and anarchy. Flat structures need accountability, support, transparent information, and mechanisms for resolving conflicts and exceptions.
So… now the downside. This book actually says relatively little. It’s also rather dry. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. There's a place for books that say little but do so in a well founded way. But it does mean that if you’re looking for a practical “field guide” to flattening, this gives you the right questions to ask about decision rights, capability, information, coordination, and accountability, but doesn’t always offer concrete answers.
In the end, I recommend this book as a complement to other books on decentralization—such as Reinventing Organizations—and not as a standalone guide or motivational text. Its main contribution is to make the case for a more sober and specific approach: don’t start by deciding that you want to be flat. Start with the work you need to do, identify which decisions benefit from being closer to the people with the relevant information, and then design the organization around that.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review