> Although there's a countervailing view that humans motivated by passion perform better -- perhaps dramatically better -- than those who feel like cogs in a ma

> Although there's a countervailing view that humans motivated by passion perform better -- perhaps dramatically better -- than those who feel like cogs in a machine. I'm not sure that matters much. If it delivers more to the bottom line to treat people like cogs so that the org is more scalable, then that's probably what will happen. In modern distributed systems, we've de-emphasized vertical scalability (in our analogy, an individual's motivation and performance) to improve horizontal scalability, fault tolerance, flexibility, etc. It sucks to admit, but if your organization needs those kind of scaling characteristics, then treating your employees like cogs may be the most profitable organizational structure.