Almost all companies organize people in a hierarchy, and then run well known managerial processes (planning, budgeting, staffing, measuring, etc) with it. We have all seen so many hierarchical org charts — sprawling boxes of letters and arrows arranged in inverted pyramids — and have been through so many budget, planning, and problem solving meetings, that we take all of this as a given, as if it had existed forever. In fact, it hasn’t.