What do you call the paradigm in old-world militaries, where a lord would conscript their knights as officers during wartime; grant them "personal" budgets; and then each knight could take that budget and use it however they wished—by investing in technology, fortifications, or salaried subordinate hires, in any mix they liked, as long as it got the job done?
Yes, it's "feudalism", but it's a specific part of feudalism, that deserves to be called out separately—the idea that "everything must flow" through the org chart in a literal sense, with each node on the org-chart entirely encapsulating everything below it on the chart from the view of those above, such that the knight's liege-lord really doesn't know how they're getting the job done, just that they are or aren't; and has no actual capacity to micro-manage the HR decisions of the knight, with the lord's only controls on their knight being to change their budget, or to fire them.
In a way, it's less like what we're doing today in bigcorps, and more like what you get on the other end, when everyone is an individual, atomized contractor selling their services to everyone else. You can't see "through" a contractor-client relationship to the contractor's employees and/or subcontractors; you can only fire the contractor, or renegotiate their rate.
IMHO, while this paradigm might seem inefficient in ways, it still seems like a better "organizational architecture" than managerialism. Perhaps because, given the encapsulation, a punishment coming from your boss's boss can never "run downhill" to end up falling on you (though, nor can a reward); instead, each node on the org-chart can only rewrd/punish their direct report. At some point someone on the org-chart claims ultimate responsibility for getting the job done; and even if it came down to you, three nodes lower, failing to do it, it would still be their head, because it's their promise to their liege-lord.
Such a paradigm is inconvenient, in the sense that if your boss is fired, that means that you're out of a job—you were being paid, effectively, out of your boss's salary. But it's also convenient, in the sense that you can just apply for a job with another part of the company (really, apply to another superior to work for them), and there won't be any institutional bias (e.g. records of a "Performance Improvement Plan" against you because of a bad previous boss's poisonous office-politicking, only the personal biases of the boss's direct friends, who you can just avoid.)
Yeah there many large companies work somewhat in this way and one of the side effects is that there is a lot of competition for resources and projects and a lot of duplication. Small fiefdom get formed and battles between groups happen for control and the winner is not always based on merit. Those organization often end up starting to get dysfunctional.
In my view a larger version of that is the way the military is setup in the US. Lots of duplication. Every branch has planes and when they try to coordinate on large projects you get the F-22 project where every branch has demands that make the project take longer, more expensive and, with lots more compromises.
Yes, it's "feudalism", but it's a specific part of feudalism, that deserves to be called out separately—the idea that "everything must flow" through the org chart in a literal sense, with each node on the org-chart entirely encapsulating everything below it on the chart from the view of those above, such that the knight's liege-lord really doesn't know how they're getting the job done, just that they are or aren't; and has no actual capacity to micro-manage the HR decisions of the knight, with the lord's only controls on their knight being to change their budget, or to fire them.
In a way, it's less like what we're doing today in bigcorps, and more like what you get on the other end, when everyone is an individual, atomized contractor selling their services to everyone else. You can't see "through" a contractor-client relationship to the contractor's employees and/or subcontractors; you can only fire the contractor, or renegotiate their rate.
IMHO, while this paradigm might seem inefficient in ways, it still seems like a better "organizational architecture" than managerialism. Perhaps because, given the encapsulation, a punishment coming from your boss's boss can never "run downhill" to end up falling on you (though, nor can a reward); instead, each node on the org-chart can only rewrd/punish their direct report. At some point someone on the org-chart claims ultimate responsibility for getting the job done; and even if it came down to you, three nodes lower, failing to do it, it would still be their head, because it's their promise to their liege-lord.
Such a paradigm is inconvenient, in the sense that if your boss is fired, that means that you're out of a job—you were being paid, effectively, out of your boss's salary. But it's also convenient, in the sense that you can just apply for a job with another part of the company (really, apply to another superior to work for them), and there won't be any institutional bias (e.g. records of a "Performance Improvement Plan" against you because of a bad previous boss's poisonous office-politicking, only the personal biases of the boss's direct friends, who you can just avoid.)