I think everyone agrees the status quo for most companies isn't working. The hard question is how do you change it? Simply 'challenging' your workers is not really enough (although a good start). For smaller innovative companies there isn't a lot of bureaucracy yet, and the chances are the founders have had a direct part in hiring all the staff – with a vested interest in picking the top quality people they can. And with top quality staff of course you naturally give them the freedom and flexibility to be as effective as they can.<p>The problems I believe starts when the company is much larger. The bureaucracy kicks in and each line of management struggles to work out what they ‘control’. Large bands of like minded ‘productive’ workers congregate which is great, but large bands of ‘we don’t do much around here’ workers congregate too.<p>Ricardo Semler (Semco) had an interesting strategy for dealing with this that I think would be interesting to see IT shops try. He broke his company up into many autonomous cells all less than 100 employees. He also stripped the management and kept a hierarchy of only three layers.