Hi Leigh,

Great post!

I particularly like your observation on adverse selection against creativity and innovation - I’m a big advocate for dismantling command-and-control structures. These persistent artifacts of the industrial revolution have had very little relevance for generations now, not only in knowledge intensive sectors such as the professional services industry, but also in workplaces built around the routine operations of mass production that originally inspired them.

Even the steelworks at Sparrows Point, where Fredrick Winslow Taylor (the founding father of ‘Scientific Management’ and 20th century management practices) once worked, abandoned the traditional command-and-control management model in 1993 in favour of developing a more engaging system to provoke a culture of knowledge sharing and teaming (refer to W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, Harvard Business Review, “Fair Process: Managing in the Knowledge Economy”, January 2003 - link to article: http://hbr.org/2003/01/fair-process-managing-in-the-knowledge-economy/ar/1 ).

Out-of-date hierarchical and bureaucratic cultures built around command-and-control structures will continue to hobble the organizations that cling to them in the years ahead as the Millennials (Generation Y – born between 1977 and 1997) become the dominate workforce demographic (J. Meister and K. Willyerd, The 2020 Workplace, Harper Collins, 2010. Page 16 - link to book on amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0061763276/ref=cm_sw_su_dp ).

Thanks again for a though-provoking post.

Cheers

James.