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The Org
A book by an economist and an editor on why workplaces work the way they do
Why it’s worth your time
Plenty of what's frustrating about organizations, from paperwork to managers who seem to add little, looks like plain dysfunction from the inside. Ray Fisman and Tim Sullivan argue that much of it is the visible cost of trade-offs every organization has to make. Seeing the trade-off doesn't make a bad process good, but it can make it easier to fix, or to live with.
Why organizations work the way they do
The book · About 7 hours of reading · Buy or borrow
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- Start with the chapter that fits your question.
Among the chapter titles Freakonomics listed are What Management Is Good For and In Praise of Squelching Innovation. Start with whichever question bothers you more.
- Ask why one rule exists.
Pick one process at work that frustrates you, such as an approval step, a report or a standing meeting. Ask someone who's been there longer what problem it was meant to solve. Write down the answer and whether that problem still exists.
Good moments for this: after a frustrating reorgwhen a process slows you downin your first months at a new company
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Making it work for you
Every workplace is different. Here’s what to think about before you start, and what might get in the way.
Things to think about
It's worth asking what your own role is measured on, and what good work of yours goes uncounted.
What might make this harder
Ask who owns the process and what would happen without it. If nobody can say, take that to whoever can change it, with a suggestion: here's what I saw, here's what I think it costs, here's what we might try.
Questions people ask
What is The Org about?
Why organizations work the way they do. Fisman and Sullivan use economics to explain the trade-offs behind familiar office frustrations, with cases from McDonald's, Procter & Gamble and Google.
Why do companies have so much bureaucracy?
In The Org's account, much of it comes from trade-offs every organization faces as it grows, such as keeping people in step while still leaving room for new ideas.
Does The Org explain why CEOs spend so much time in meetings?
Yes. Its publisher's description says the book shows why CEOs often spend most of their time in meetings, and argues that's where they should be.
What it says, and how it holds up
If you work somewhere large, there's probably a rule that seems designed to waste your time: the approval nobody reads, the report nobody uses. Ray Fisman, an economist then at Columbia Business School, and Tim Sullivan, then editorial director of Harvard Business Review Press, wrote The Org in 2013 to explain where such things come from. Their argument is that the frustrating parts of an organization are often the price of what it does well.
They start from why organizations exist at all, to get done what people can't do alone, and work up from the cubicle to the CEO's office. Their publisher's description lists some of the cases along the way, from Google and the Baltimore police to al Qaeda, and promises an answer to why a hospital's administration may do more to save your life than its heart surgeon.
Slate ran an excerpt in 2013, and the book was reviewed in Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. Its publisher's description makes the case that organizations, maddening as they are, are still the best way to get a job done. That's a generous view, written from economics, and the generosity cuts both ways. Explaining a trade-off can drift into excusing it, and a rule can have a good reason and still cost more than it saves.
The book's lens is the system. When the thing making work hard is one person's behavior, a structural explanation can make it sound more inevitable than it is, and what helps is a direct, specific conversation with that person.
Other perspectives
Different takes on the same question. You don't have to pick a side.
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Picked by Truest and described in our own words. The original belongs to its creator. Last updated October 9, 2026. We sell a career membership; where that’s relevant above, we say so.