- you need project management. It is an administrative work.
- you need people management. You can leave that to HR, they will do a very poor job, so it's better to have a person from the team fill that role, the more senior and experienced the better. This is admin work
- you need to simplify large organizations into smaller, manageable teams that can focus on items they can swallow. You need team leaders (for the 2 reasons above) and good communicators to keep the team in sync with the rest of the company
- when you have many teams you need "teams of teams", that is one or more management levels.
In any army you don't have management, you have a chain of command. You have generals with a strategy and a vision, you have officers that lead portions of the army, you have NCOs that lead small teams and you have specialists or riflemen that do the grunt work. They all have a role and in most cases you find the higher the rank, the higher the competence, otherwise nobody would follow in battle an incompetent officer (or even shoot him in the back, it's easier in a battle than getting rid of a bad manager in the office).
This hierarchical organization came from real needs and stays there because the need is still there. You can argue some hierarchies gets corrupted, in theory all do, but a hierarchy is generally better than no hierarchy whenever the group is large enough.
Tangential on hierarchies and meshworks by Manuel De Landa: http://netbase.org/delanda/meshwork.htm
"To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for."
- you need project management. It is an administrative work.
- you need people management. You can leave that to HR, they will do a very poor job, so it's better to have a person from the team fill that role, the more senior and experienced the better. This is admin work
- you need to simplify large organizations into smaller, manageable teams that can focus on items they can swallow. You need team leaders (for the 2 reasons above) and good communicators to keep the team in sync with the rest of the company
- when you have many teams you need "teams of teams", that is one or more management levels.
In any army you don't have management, you have a chain of command. You have generals with a strategy and a vision, you have officers that lead portions of the army, you have NCOs that lead small teams and you have specialists or riflemen that do the grunt work. They all have a role and in most cases you find the higher the rank, the higher the competence, otherwise nobody would follow in battle an incompetent officer (or even shoot him in the back, it's easier in a battle than getting rid of a bad manager in the office).
This hierarchical organization came from real needs and stays there because the need is still there. You can argue some hierarchies gets corrupted, in theory all do, but a hierarchy is generally better than no hierarchy whenever the group is large enough.