Beyond command and control: people, autonomy and leadership in the changing enterprise

We are experiencing what many are calling a new industrial revolution: a radical change involving technologies, skills and ways of working. And yet, all over the world, we continue to run companies with organisational models born in the 19th century: vertical, rigid, centred on control rather than autonomy. These are the models inherited from Taylor's scientific principles of management, designed to optimise repetitive work in the factory, still surprisingly applied today in highly complex and creative contexts. Technologies change, people evolve, but many companies remain stuck in an architecture of power designed for a world that no longer exists.

This disconnect is reflected in a growing disconnect between workers and business. According to the report State of the Global Workplace 2025 by Gallup, in Italy only 10% of workers say they are involved in their work, one of the lowest figures in Europe. But the real impact is not only human. Gallup also estimates that, globally, lost productivity due to lack of engagement generated a cost of USD 438 billion in 2024 alone. International studies show that work disengagement can weigh over one percentage point of GDP in industrialised countries. A silent ballast that slows down growth, innovation and competitiveness.

The most urgent change that organisations need to address concerns the way we understand management. The wider the distance between the decision-maker and the implementer, the greater the risk of mediocre results: without engagement, people's potential remains unexpressed. While this distance once made sense, because the manager held the skills and information, the opposite is often the case today: in the age of knowledge, it is the employees who know more, faster and with more context than their managers.

We need to rethink the enterprise from a different perspective. We need a new operating system for organisations, one that is capable of accommodating the complexity that arises from the fact that companies are networks of relationships, not mere organigrams. An organisation is much more like a living system - complex, adaptive - than a machine that is complicated to manage and control. The difference is crucial: a complicated system can be broken down into its pieces, analysed and reassembled, like an engine; a complex system, on the other hand, is made up of interconnected elements that influence each other in unpredictable ways. Top-down control does not work in complex contexts, but organisational models capable of adapting, learning and decentralising decisions are needed.

This new column was created with exactly this purpose in mind: to advance a new narrative, inspired by the paradigm of so-called 'progressive organisations'. An approach that questions everything: hierarchies, fixed roles, obsolete metrics and leadership styles based on control. We will be talking about distributed leadership, dynamic roles, absence of hierarchies, decentralised decision making, radical transparency, continuous feedback, inclusion and enhancement of diversity, technology in the service of culture, active involvement of people in defining strategy, and even self-management. We will ask ourselves whether AI, as it seems, can really enable this new perspective, decoupling those who possess knowledge from those who execute. Because, so far, knowledge is power - and often, for many managers, it is the only way to legitimise their role.