ABSTRACT
Traditionally, in change-resistant organizations, strategies were normally set by senior management, and their implementation carried out by middle managers under the surveillance of a powerful cadre of corporate service staff in such functions as personnel, finance and IT. This often created a complex and inflexible web of matrix management, with an emasculation of junior management and staff that had a stultifying effect on morale. Short-term financial management and long term IT strategies (both often insensitive to market realities) placed a stranglehold on initiative which endures in many organizations today. To hold these substantial administrative structures together, a high degree of process formality was essential, with elaborate means of recording and transmitting intentions to a wide variety of colleagues. Junior staff had access to typing pools, while senior managers enjoyed the services and status of a secretary to record their activities and issue instructions. Even the immediate exchange of ideas was through a structure of more or less formal meetings in which status and hierarchy played a crucial if not always explicit role.
