One of my colleagues—a super-smart scholar and all-around wonderful person—once asked me for my ideas about topics to cover in an upcoming class about organizational structure. He recognized the importance of the topic in general, but he wasn’t finding anything particularly exciting to cover. The typical areas of formalization, span of control, centralization and the chain of command simply weren’t doing it for him.

I can’t remember what I may have suggested for that class. Whatever I said, it probably wasn’t very helpful.

But my thinking about organizational structure has changed in recent years,