When Bureaucracy Becomes the Impediment

Bureaucracy slows decisions, kills innovation, and drives a wedge between organizations and their customers. Yet most agile transformations leave bureaucratic structures intact. They introduce standups, sprints, and cross-functional teams inside organizations where strategy is centrally determined, success is defined by process compliance, and teams never face real customers. The result? Agile theater.

This isn't a new problem. Economists like Ludwig von Mises argued decades ago that without genuine market feedback, rational decision-making is impossible. Organizations that shield internal units from customer reality will become bureaucratic — not because of bad leadership, but because of structural information problems.

In this session, Sohrab Salimi examines what happens when leaders take bureaucracy-busting seriously. We'll look at Bayer under CEO Bill Anderson, who is implementing Gary Hamel's Humanocracy framework at scale — replacing hierarchy with mission teams, eliminating annual planning, and attempting one of the largest de-bureaucratization experiments in corporate history.

You'll leave with a deeper understanding of why agility and bureaucracy cannot coexist, why customer centricity is structurally impossible in traditional hierarchies, and what radical alternatives actually look like in practice.