MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Make the Move to Distributed Leadership

Most legacy companies are organized around hierarchies that worked in the 1980s — but won’t necessarily be effective today.

MIT Sloan Management Review: We read some of your thinking on distributed leadership, and I was wondering if you could describe this concept and what it looks like at your organization. Maile Carnegie: If you look at the way business is run in a modern 21st century company, whether it’s Google or Amazon.com or others, it is organized in an agile way. Decisions are made by the people who are closest to the customer. This means you get a lot more speed in delivery and speed to value. Employee engagement levels are also much higher in these agile 21st century companies.

Most of the traditional 20th century companies — such as Procter & Gamble, which I’ve worked for, and now ANZ — are still very much organized around functional, classical 1980s hierarchy. They tend to run excruciatingly slow.Employee engagement is on the decline.