The Organization as a Machine: An Outdated Concept

As we entered the Industrial Age, which required large groups of people working in a coordinated way, it was natural to leverage the military model as the most efficient model for corporate organizational structure. 

Most managers had risen from the ranks of military experience, further entrenching military discipline and norms throughout the emerging corporate structure. This remained true through the formation of the modern business schools, whose coming of age occurred on the heels of World War II. 

The impact of these influences remains today. It shows up in the language of business, for example – think of all the business jargon that clearly has military roots. Our actions are defined by missions, strategies, and tactics, which we roll out at all-hands meetings. In marketing, we defend our position to ensure that we don’t lose ground. To capture market share, we might use guerilla marketing. We talk about the chain of command, including leadership ranks and their subordinates, the boots on the ground and their frontline managers. We give people promotions and honor their years of service. Even my own business school was organized into cohorts—a structure modeled after the Roman legions.

Historically, men predominantly led and populated armies, lending not only an overtly military language to business but also a masculine one, impacting not only the words of business but also its culture. The structure favored men, creating a highly homogenous workforce, which was hostile to diversity of all types, especially women. Theses impacts are also still apparent, with 94% of current Fortune 500 CEOs being male and 68% of those being white.¹

As a result, we’ve been trained to think of organizations as homogenous and mechanistic, with a clear set of rules, a command-and-control structure, and the ability to leverage hierarchy to get things done quickly by issuing top-down directives to reallocate resources to meet objectives.

The metaphor of the organization as a machine becomes apparent – an easily programmable structure that will run the “program” that we define, and then pivot in a new direction as soon as we provide new instructions.

By and large, this was true up until the end of the 20th century. The corporate structure and the needs of the organization were tantamount, and the individuals in the system were seen as “human resources” – in effect a cog in the wheel of the machine, easily replaceable when they wore out.

This was easier to maintain with a homogenous workforce, leaders trained in the command-and-control mindset, and a prevailing system stacked in favor of the employer. For most of modern history, this was the context that ruled the world of work.

What changed? A number of factors:

The influence of military tradition is on the retreat

The untangling of the military from modern organizations is accelerating, and its influence is waning. When President Dwight Eisenhower described the intersection of military and corporate entities as the military-industrial complex in his farewell address of 1961, military spending represented 9% of the U.S. economy. Today, that has shrunk by two-thirds to 3 percent, driven by reduced peacetime spending, technological efficiencies of scale, and privatization.²

In addition to the military playing a smaller part in our overall economy, it also employs significantly fewer people and plays a much smaller part in the grooming of our leadership ranks (pardon the military jargon). According to research by Benmelech and Frydman, as recently as 1980, 59 percent of the CEOs of large public corporations had served in the military. By 2013, only 6 percent were led by CEOs with military experience.³

As a result, the influence of structure, process, language, and behaviors rooted in the military experience are waning in our organizations, creating space for new ways of being and a proliferation of different models of organizational design and management.

The modern workforce has greater power and increased protections

While labor revolts like the peasant revolts in medieval England have occurred throughout history when workers rise up to fight for fair working conditions, the Industrial Age elevated this to a human rights issue at a scale too large to ignore. 

Though power was once universally in the hands of employers, in the last century global labor rights movements have shifted the balance of power towards employees.

This was accelerated by the advent and influence of global organizations. In 1919, the International Labour Organization (ILO) was formed as part of the League of Nations to protect workers’ rights, and this organization was later incorporated into the United Nations.

Under the United Nations, several workers’ rights were described and incorporated into two articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, which has now been signed by 192 nations. 

While we may take these changes for granted, it is important to understand that it’s been less than a century since these rights were acknowledged, let alone implemented. In the United States, for example: 

• It wasn’t until 1935 that the National Labor Relations Act enshrined labor rights in the nation.
• It wasn’t until 1938 that the Fair Labor Standards Act first made accommodations for the establishment of an eight-hour workday, time-and-a-half pay for overtime, and clear limitations around child labor.
• It wasn’t until 1963 that the Equal Pay Act sought to abolish wage disparity between genders. 
• It wasn’t until 1964 that the Civil Rights Act banned discrimination based on race.
• It wasn’t until 1967 that the Age Discrimination in Employment Act created protections for older workers.
• It wasn’t until 1993 that the Family and Medical Leave Act ensured that workers have job-protected (but unpaid) leave for qualified medical and family reasons.