Here's what we should learn from the National Football League: It's time to sack the refs. That's right. Get rid of them. Say good-bye to the zebras. They've made pro football unwatchable, so I'm proposing the near total eradication of their suffocating official presence. In their place, I envision a new combination of common sense rules and a new emphasis on sportsmanship among players.

We probably should have seen this day coming, because it comes to nearly all organizations. In the slow organizational death spiral, visionary founders give way to regulators who eventually succumb to bureaucrats, defined here as any functionary whose focus is so intense and small that he can't envision how his work might be undermining the enterprise's larger goals. And, once your organizational playing field has too high a bureaucrat-to-visionary ratio, organizational demise is avoided only through the arrival of new visionaries. Even then, the organization may not return to what it once was.

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