Announcing the Winners of the Beyond Bureaucracy Challenge

By Polly LaBarre
February 14, 2012 at 11:25am

We are delighted to announce the winners of the Beyond Bureaucracy Challenge (the second leg of the HBR/McKinsey M-Prize for Management Innovation) today.

We asked some big questions in our quest to bust bureaucracy:

14 Ideas for Busting Bureaucracy

By Polly LaBarre
January 11, 2012 at 6:27pm

Everybody hates it, but so much of life is ruled by it: bureaucracy. It's time to bust up the ideology of control that has infiltrated every aspect of organizational life.

That's why we launched the Beyond Bureaucracy Challenge (the second leg of the HBR/McKinsey M-Prize for Management Innovation)--a call for inspiring stories, bold ideas, and instructive experiments that demonstrate what can happen when you scrap compliance, conformance, and predictability for freedom, passion, and dynamism.

Who gets a seat at the table?

By Polly LaBarre
December 8, 2011 at 11:38am

“That was a small lesson I learned on the journey. What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by a familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves.”
—Michael Ondaatje, The Cat's Table

Busting Bureaucracy with Radical Management

By Steve Denning
December 5, 2011 at 12:16pm

To transform organizations so that they are fit for human beings--more inspiring and engaging and yet just as disciplined and even more productive--we need to understand why promising ideas for improving management developed in the 20th Century--such as teams, empowerment, delayering or innovation--failed to become a permanent part of the standard management repertoire.

What's Your Question?

By Polly LaBarre
November 10, 2011 at 9:59am

Some fifteen years ago, in the early days of starting up Fast Company magazine, co-founder Alan Webber, shared one of his rules of thumb with me: "a good question beats a good answer." That pithy wisdom sunk in and took hold immediately. In the course of hundreds of reporting journeys and thousands of conversations with leaders, entrepreneurs, thinkers, and doers of all stripes, I've tuned into the questions people ask.