In last weeks blog the practice of purpose we espoused the virtues of a Purpose led organisation. If it is deemed the right way to navigate, then how come it is so rare? Most of us grew up in and around organizations that fit a common template. Strategy gets set at the top. Power trickles down. Big leaders appoint little leaders. Individuals compete for promotion. Compensation correlates with rank. Tasks are assigned. Managers assess performance. This is the recipe for “bureaucracy,” the 150-year old mash-up of military command structures and industrial age engineering that constitutes the operating system for virtually every large-scale organization on the planet. It is the unchallenged tenets of bureaucracy that disable our organizations—that make them inertial, incremental and uninspiring.  To find a cure, we will have to reinvent the Purpose of modern management — a topic that isn’t often discussed in boardrooms or business schools.

Business people typically regard themselves as pragmatists, individuals who take pride in their commonsense utilitarianism. This is a conceit. Managers, no less than libertarians, environmental campaigners, and the devotees of Trumpism, are shaped by their ideological biases. So what’s the ideology of bureaucrats? Controlism. Open any thesaurus and you’ll find that the primary synonym for the word “manage,” when used as verb, is “control.” “To manage” is “to control.”

Managers worship at the altar of conformance. That’s their calling—to ensure conformance to product specifications, work rules, deadlines, budgets, quality standards, and corporate policies. More than 60 years ago, Max Weber declared bureaucracy to be “the most rational known means of carrying out imperative control over human beings.” He was right. Bureaucracy is the technology of control. It is ideologically and practically opposed to disorder and irregularity. Problem is, in an age of disruption, it’s the irregular people with irregular ideas who create the irregular business models that generate the irregular returns. Think AirbnB. Think Facebook. Think Amazon.

Unfettered controlism cripples organizational vitality.  Adaptability, whether in the biological or commercial realm, requires experimentation—and experiments are more likely to go wrong than right—a scary reality for those charged with excising inefficiencies.  Truly disruptive ideas are, by definition, deviant or abnormal, and therefore likely to be viewed skeptically in a conformance-obsessed culture.  Engagement is also negatively correlated with control. Shrink an individual’s scope of authority, and you shrink their incentive to dream, imagine and contribute.

Make no mistake: control is important, as is alignment, discipline and accountability—but freedom is equally important. If an organization is going to outrun the future, individuals need the freedom to bend the rules, take risks, go around channels, launch experiments, and pursue their passions. Unfortunately, managers often see control and freedom as mutually exclusive—as ideological rivals like communism and capitalism, rather than as ideological complements like mercy and justice. As long as control is exalted at the expense of freedom, our organizations will remain incompetent at their core.

There’s no other way to put it: bureaucracy must perish. We must find a way to reap the blessings of bureaucracy—precision, consistency, and predictability—while at the same time killing it. Bureaucracy, both architecturally and ideologically, is incompatible with the demands of the disruptive 21st century.

Some might argue that the biggest challenge facing contemporary business leaders is the undue prominence given to shareholder returns, or the fact that corporations have too long ignored their social responsibilities. These are indeed challenges, but they are neither as pervasive nor as problematic as the challenge of defeating bureaucracy.

First, only a minority of the world’s employees work in publicly held corporations that are subject to the rigors of capitalism. Bureaucracy, on the other hand, is universal. Activists everywhere need to be encouraged.

Second, most progressive leaders, like Apple’s Tim Cook or Jeff Bezos from Amazon, already understand that the first priority of a business is to do something truly amazing for consumers, that shareholder returns are but one measure of success, that short-term ROI calculations can’t be used to act as the sole justification for strategic investments, and that, since corporate freedoms are socially negotiated, businesses must be responsive to the broader needs of the societies in which they operate.

Yes, work still needs to be done to better align CEO compensation with long-term value creation, but that work is already well underway. And while some CEOs still grumble that investors are inherently short-term in their outlook, their argument breaks down the moment you realize that investors often happily award a fast-growing company a price-earnings multiple that is many times the market average.

Simply put, at this point in business history, the pay-off from reforming capitalism, while substantial, pales in comparison to the gains that could be reaped from creating organizations that are as fully capable as the employees who work within them.

There would be few executives around the world who are champions of bureaucracy, but there are fewer who are actively pursuing an alternative. For too long we’ve been fiddling at the margins. We’ve flattened corporate hierarchies, but haven’t eliminated them. We’ve eulogized empowerment, but haven’t distributed executive authority. We’ve encouraged employees to speak up, but haven’t allowed them to set strategy. We’ve been advocates for disruption, but haven’t systematically dismantled the barriers that keep it marginalized. We’ve talked (endlessly) about the need for change, but haven’t taught employees how to be internal activists. We’ve denounced bureaucracy, but haven’t dethroned it; and now we must.

We have to face the fact that any change program that doesn’t address the architectural rigidities and ideological prejudices of bureaucracy won’t, in fact, change much at all. We need to remind ourselves that bureaucracy was an invention, and that whatever replaces it will also be an invention—a cluster of radically new management principles and processes that will help us take advantage of scale, that will maximize efficiency without suffocating disruption, that will boost discipline without extinguishing freedom. We can cure the core incompetencies of the corporation—but only with a bold and concerted effort to ignite culture with a Purpose led mandate.