The talk's simplicity drives me a bit batty.<p>The British feudal society was not so clearly hierarchical. Now, he says it's a "gross simplification", with the goal of expressing some underlying truthiness. But over and over again he says that people in the hierarchical system don't question their position.<p>See the Magna Carta and the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 as two examples where people did question their position under the feudal system.<p>See matrix management and dotted line manager as examples of modern attempts at alternatives to strict hierarchical structures.<p>The speaker complains about the lack of internal markets at a large company. OTOH, the promotion of internal competitive markets is often described as one of the reasons for the downfall of Sears. See <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/07/16/do-internal-markets-nourish-innovation-the-case-of-sears/" rel="nofollow">http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/07/16/do-inter...</a> :<p>> The model “also created a top-heavy cost structure, according to a former vice president for human resources. Because Sears had to hire and promote dozens of chief financial officers and chief marketing officers, personnel expenses shot up. Meanwhile, many business unit leaders underpaid middle managers to trim costs.”<p>> For innovation, internal markets have the same problem as hierarchical bureaucracies. Managers vote their resources for innovations that bolster their current fiefdoms and careers. The safest strategy is to stick to the status quo. Ms. Kimes’ article gives multiple examples where competing managers at Sears looked after their own units at the expense of the interests of the firm as a whole.<p>There's also the problem that he compares companies to feudal societies, without the awareness that feudalism is relatively new. The Roman Empire had a non-feudal society, but was still structured hierarchically.<p>In fact, to quote from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism#History_of_feudalism" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism#History_of_feudalism</a> :<p>> Feudalism, in its various forms, usually emerged as a result of the decentralization of an empire: especially in the Carolingian empires which both lacked the bureaucratic infrastructure[clarification needed] necessary to support cavalry without the ability to allocate land to these mounted troops.<p>The speaker describes feudalism as a centralized command-and-control system. That doesn't fit the idea that it's a decentralized system, with respect to an empire.<p>Is a company structure more like late feudal England? Or like Imperial Rome? If the latter, then it's wrong to say that modern companies are "feudal".<p>Edit: Grr! And it's like the 1950s-era push towards flat corporate structures never existed. Nor the co-op movement like Mondragon Corporation.