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Maybe it’s time for a bold collaborative effort in management. By working together, could we light the fires of management innovation in thousands of organizations?

We bet you hate bureaucracy as much as we do.  Every day it squanders vast quantities of human initiative and imagination. It makes our organizations inertial and incremental. If we’re going to change this, we need first-person accounts of bureaucratic lunacy.

Do you know how much bureaucracy is really costing your organization? It’s probably more than you think. Here’s how you can estimate your organization’s BMI. 

More people are working in big, bureaucratic organizations than ever before. Yet there’s compelling evidence that bureaucracy creates a significant drag on productivity and organizational resilience and innovation. By our reckoning, the cost of excess bureaucracy in the U.S. economy amounts to more than $3 trillion in lost economic output, or about 17% of GDP.

Around the world, productivity growth has stalled out. While some hope that a “second machine age” will reverse the slump, we think that wringing bureaucracy out of the economy offers a more promising and less speculative route to boosting productivity.  By our calculations, busting bureaucracy would add $3 trillion to economic growth in the US alone.  Dismantling bureaucracy won’t be easy, but it has to happen—bureaucracy must die. The $3 Trillion Prize provides a detailed blueprint for abolishing the bureaucracy tax in your organization, and everywhere else.

Can you think of any business topic that’s been hotter for longer than innovation? Trouble is, it’s hard to think of any business challenge where real pro­gress has been harder to come by. By now, your company probably has a new business incubator, an idea wiki, a disciplined process for mining customer insights, an awards program for successful innovators, and maybe even an outpost in Silicon Valley—all fine ideas—and yet, most likely, it still struggles to meet its growth goals and seldom thrills its customers.

Pope Francis has made no secret of his intention to radically reform the administrative structures of the Catholic church, which he regards as insular, imperious, and bureaucratic. He understands that in a hyper-kinetic world, inward-looking and self-obsessed leaders are a liability. Last year, just before Christmas, the Pope addressed the leaders of the Roman Curia — the Cardinals and other officials who are charged with running the...

Almost 25 years ago in the pages of HBR, C.K. Prahalad and I urged managers to think in a different way about the building blocks of competitive success. We argued that a business should be seen as a portfolio of “core competencies” as well as a portfolio of products. By building and nurturing deep, hard-to-replicate skills, an organization could fatten margins and fuel growth. While I still believe that distinctive capabilities are essential to distinctive performance, I have increasingly come to believethat even the most...

Transformational-change initiatives have a dismal track record. In 1996, Harvard Business School professor John Kotter claimed that nearly 70 percent of large-scale change programs didn’t meet their goals,1 and virtually every survey since has shown similar results. Why is change so confounding? We don’t think the issue lies with an understanding of its building blocks—Kotter’s classic eight-step change-management model is still a helpful guide.