Writing for Harvard Business Review in 1988, the renowned Peter Drucker predicted that in twenty years the average organization would have slashed the number of management layers by half and shrunk its managerial ranks by two-thirds. Yet despite the recent emergence of the “gig economy” and the “sharing economy,” there’s no evidence that bureaucracy is on the ropes—quite the opposite, in fact.

In 1993, 47% of U.S. private sector employees worked in organizations with more than 500 individuals on the payroll. Twenty years later, that number had grown to 51.6%. Large organizations, those with more than 5,000 employees, increased their employment share the most—from 29.4% to 33.4%.

Meanwhile, the percentage of Americans who are self-employed dropped to an all-time low. Today, of the roughly 120 million Americans working in the private sector, 62 million work in organizations that are big enough to have the trappings of bureaucracy. To this number we must add the 22 million souls who work in public sector organizations, where bureaucracy seems as inescapable and unremarkable as coffee-stained carpeting.

Within these organizations, the “bureaucratic class” has been growing, not shrinking. Between 1983 and 2014, the number of managers, supervisors and support staff employed...

As an open innovation and collaborative platform, the MIX is able to thrive thanks to the contributions of the most progressive leaders, provocative management thinkers, and in-the-trenches management innovators—indeed, anyone with ideas for making our organizations fit for the 21st century. As we begin a new year, we’d like to recognize the five most popular Hacks, Stories, Videos, and Blog Posts of 2012, based on traffic.