Most books about orgs are written for people in an org who need to cope. (Art of Possibility by the Zanders is a genuinely great one in this genre.) I am currently orgless and don’t need to cope with anything orgwise. Hence, I would love to read some brutal insightful takes on how companies and nonprofits and governments etc work. Anything about tech cos or applied research orgs would be especially interesting. I’ll start with the classic: Moral Mazes.
I can’t find any articles, but in the meandering lectures of David Snowden he often rips into the stifling nature of working for IBM and the unofficial and informal networks and practices that emerged to work around them. In this lecture about 2:00 in he’s already talking about mass “fraud” in another firm he worked for and a lesson he learned about how to deal with it.
I am a tremendous fan of the comedy Yes, Minister which dramatizes exactly what you’re talking about—the (in)operation of government, appointments to Quangos, funding for the arts and national theatres, and overstaffing. It was partly inspired by The Crossman Diaries. I haven’t read them and can’t vouch for them, but they are diaries of a British Labor politician Richard Crossman and if it is anything like Yes, Minister then it will be filled with examples of horse-trading, institutional paralysis, wasteful spending and the like. Here is a review by Clive James.
He points out that Crossman spent many years as a backbencher and when he finally managed to become a minister and run a department he was frequently left out of committees. Later on he notes that Crossman was a self-professed “intellectual bully” who likely downplays how much of a bully he was in the diaries. Adding “the overconfident, uncalculating frankness which made him a valuable member of the government would have made him a ruinous leader of it.”
Not a central example, but Skunkworks has much shade to throw at the inefficiencies of large orgs.