The Dark Matter of the Org Chart

Why your company works better than its structure explains, and why every reorg breaks the part nobody can see The rotation problemIn the 1970s, Vera Rubin pointed a spectrograph at spiral galaxies and discovered something rude. The stars out at the rim were moving far too fast. If you weigh a galaxy by counting the light coming out of it, the outer stars should behave like children on a carousel that is spinning too quickly - flung outward, gone. Instead they orbit serenely, held in place by something with no apparent interest in being visible. There were only two ways out. Either gravity does not work the way we thought, or there is a great deal of mass we cannot see. Astronomers, conservative in the good sense, chose the second. It turns out that roughly five sixths of the mass of the universe is furniture we keep barking our shins on in the dark. Now open your company's org chart. Forty boxes. Eleven dotted lines drawn by someone who had clearly stopped believing in the exercise.…