However, if you strip away all of the McKinsey jargon, it’s clear that what Peters was describing is an organization led by an Alpha who sets direction and culture, has operations overseen by Bravos who enforce standards without micromanaging, staffed by Deltas who execute within well-defined parameters, and develop new markets with Sigmas who are given the autonomy to innovate without being strangled by committee processes. His “skunk works” concept of small, autonomous teams tasked with innovation outside the normal bureaucratic structure is literally the same thing as the Sigma management strategy described in the corpocracy chapter of SIGMA GAME. Peters saw the hierarchy operating in every excellent company he studied. He just didn’t have a name for it and couldn’t figure out why some companies had it and others didn’t, because no one had yet identified and articulated the concepts required to do so.
Where Peters deserves genuine credit is in his contempt for bureaucratic sclerosis and his recognition that management is fundamentally about people rather than systems. His attack on the “rational model” of management and the idea that if you get the strategy right and the structure right and the systems right, excellence will follow automatically is entirely correct. It is is correct for the reason that the SSH identifies: because strategy, structure, and systems are only as good as the men operating them, and those men are not perfectly interchangeable components. A brilliant strategy executed by a Delta who has been promoted into a leadership role he hates will reliably produce worse results than a mediocre strategy executed by an Alpha who knows how to inspire his team and a Bravo who knows how to operationalize the vision.