It's more complicated than a hierarchy. Informal power isn't transitive, so you can have arbitrary directed graphs with loops.
It'd be an interesting experiment to build a tech startup with an overt hierarchy, where decisions were made by the person in the room with the most stripes on their shoulders. The conventional wisdom is that it would suck and you couldn't hire smart people, but sometimes the big wins are to be found in such places.
It's more complicated than a hierarchy. Informal power isn't transitive, so you can have arbitrary directed graphs with loops.
It'd be an interesting experiment to build a tech startup with an overt hierarchy, where decisions were made by the person in the room with the most stripes on their shoulders. The conventional wisdom is that it would suck and you couldn't hire smart people, but sometimes the big wins are to be found in such places.