The Barbarian Hoard: Superior Organizational Model?

In an old post I wondered if the modern world was the result of various tribes taking their turn at the helm. The systems we live in are an expression of the approach of one or two groups, and therefore don't make any fundamental sense to many of the people stuck in them. For example, if you sit through a meeting at a corporate job, you can see some of the people are completely bored and listless, maybe even pained, while others happily make spreadsheets of lists and lists of checklists. The Kafkaesque corporatocracy world is a joy for some and an existential crisis for others.

Maybe a good alternative to corporate organization is the barbarian hoard. The corporation is a perpetual ship's crew, a never ending "war", with a wartime organizational hierarchy that's created around making creamed corn, tires, or providing IT services, or whatever. Most of the people that spend the best part of their lives working in those places never intended to fine tune a creamed corn machine. It keeps running and doing the same thing because it has to, not because anyone cares if it does.

A different organization approach is the barbarian hoard--a group of people come together when they need to, or want to, to take care of some task and disband once it's complete. There might be a hierarchy, but one that only endures for the existence of the hoard. That type of organization might work for independent peoples.

It might be a good model to compete with corporate entities today, which are only capable of competing with other persistent corporate entities. We see the US military, for example, capable of wiping out another corporate nation's armed forces, but then incapable of stifling irregular troops.