I used to work in management consulting, and part of the work was figuring out the "effective" chain of command, that is, how decisions were actually made rather than how the company claimed their structure was.

I ran into a couple companies who were all about "hey we're totally groovy, horizontal, and we don't have awful bosses". Every time I would present a potentially critical situation and ask how the choices would be made and who would give the orders and who would execute them. These companies tended to be even more hierarchical and less collaborative in general than the companies who had a clear delineation of roles and responsibilities.

Then I quit because fuck capitalism and making fatcats more moneyz.