I’ve seen flat organization work well at one organization, essentially a consulting firm where we worked on short-lived projects. Teams had to assemble and disassemble within a span of two or three years.<p>It really worked well, in retrospect. Our clients (from one branch of the military or another) came to us with actual clearly-defined problems, and gave us space to engineer real solutions.<p>I left because I didn’t want to spend my time developing tech for the military, and I joined an industrial R&D lab. What a mess I walked into. Layers and layers of hierarchy, all decided by political in-fighting rather than merit, and every team is pushing mocked-up half-solutions to imaginary problems.