organizations were characterized by the separation of 
     thinking from doing; thinking was generally allocated to 
     the top rather than the bottom of the pyramid and to 
     “staff” as against “line” components. Whatever the 
     wishes of the company about the decentralized exercises 
     of authority, authority inexorably gravitated toward the 
     top of the structure. There was created a numerous 
     middle management class, spread over an indefinite 
     number of supervisory layers whose actual roles, as many 
     work studies showed, was predominantly the passing of 
     information through the system.

     In our electronic age the specialist and pyramidal forms of 
structure, which achieved vogue in the sixteenth century and 
later, are not any longer practical: