11 ms·

Also known as "the institutional imperative." Quoting Warren Buffett's 1989 letter to shareholders:[1] "My most surprising discovery: the overwhelming importa

by cs702 10y ago

Also known as "the institutional imperative." Quoting Warren Buffett's 1989 letter to shareholders:[1] "My most surprising discovery: the overwhelming importance in business of an unseen force that we might call 'the institutional imperative.' In business school, I was given no hint of the imperative's existence and I did not intuitively understand it when I entered the business world. I thought then that decent, intelligent, and experienced managers would automatically make rational business decisions. But I learned over time that isn't so. Instead, rationality frequently wilts when the institutional imperative comes into play. For example: (1) As if governed by Newton's First Law of Motion, an institution will resist any change in its current direction; (2) Just as work expands to fill available time, corporate projects or acquisitions will materialize to soak up available funds; (3) Any business craving of the leader, however foolish, will be quickly supported by detailed rate-of-return and strategic studies prepared by his troops; and (4) The behavior of peer companies, whether they are expanding, acquiring, setting executive compensation or whatever, will be mindlessly imitated. Institutional dynamics, not venality or stupidity, set businesses on these courses, which are too often misguided. After making some expensive mistakes because I ignored the power of the imperative, I have tried to organize and manage Berkshire in ways that minimize its influence. Furthermore, Charlie and I have attempted to concentrate our investments in companies that appear alert to the problem." [1] http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1989.html http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1989.html

mycall 10y ago
28 years ago, I wonder how much if this still holds true for Berkshire Hathaway.
- daviddumenil 10y ago
  NASA might offer a more salient comparison.
mboto 10y ago
Thats a really interesting quote, I hadn't heard of it before today. Do you have any resources that talk of how to organise and combat this?
- qntty 10y ago
  https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-the-conquest-of-bread https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-the-c...
  - jessedhillon 10y ago
    Is this a response suggesting that anarchy is the only way to defeat institutional inertia? Or a link to something that actually addresses the subject constructively and realistically? I ask because it's a large work, but I'd read it if it was the latter.
    - qntty 10y ago
      Of course there's many ways to solve any problem, but GP asked for a resource, and I gave one. Anarchy has been used realistically, and the book was written to be a realistic approach organizing people.
    - alxndr 10y ago
      I was also curious; here's what Wikipedia says about Kropotkin's "The Conquest of Bread": > "In this work, Kropotkin points out what he considers to be the defects of the economic systems of feudalism and capitalism, and how he believes they thrive on and maintain poverty and scarcity, as symbol for richness and in spite of being in a time of abundance thanks to technology, while promoting privilege. He goes on to propose a more decentralised economic system based on mutual aid and voluntary cooperation, asserting that the tendencies for this kind of organisation already exist, both in evolution and in human society. He also talks about details of revolution and expropriation in order not to end in a reactionary way." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conquest_of_Bread https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conquest_of_Bread
- carsongross 10y ago
  I have seen this problem first hand in a startup. I theorize that it is related to size/scale, which disassociates causes and effects across time and groups. My solution is to keep companies as small as possible
VLM 10y ago
A better more original source of pithy organizational rules would be Robert Conquests three laws of politics Everyone is conservative about what he knows best. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies. If you transform Conquest's rules from politics to running (ruining?) the wikipedia, the transformed rules are "We can change nothing not even our exponential growth spiral, not our policies, nothing" "LOL We're not doing the fiscal conservatism thing. I like how the current top discussion is about popularity and the need for a circular firing squad, not something financial. A direct quote of an attempt to avoid working on the issues "I'm reminded of the inflammatory, low-rent campaign of Donald Trump." Yeah buddy that'll fix it, that'll fix it real good." "We're headed off the financial cliff now get out of the way I'm going gas pedal to the floor as you can see in the exponential graphs. The problem is we're a CRUD app and that's cutting edge CS just like quantum computing so naturally there's no possibility of criticism there. After all, the Egyptians didn't have flush toilets and they built a pyramid, so any criticism of the toilet in my bathroom is either making fun of the entire Egyptian culture or pretending the pyramids were not a logistical challenge." There is some humor in that the world of paper encyclopedia publishing ran on mostly capitalist operational principles for decades, centuries. It turns out that running an online encyclopedia off donations and extreme hand waving is powerful enough to destroy an industry on its way to its inevitable collapse. Maybe someday in the future we'll have encyclopedias again, but the era after wikipedia and before the next encyclopedia will be a bit of a dark age. That's too bad.
- vanderZwan 10y ago
  I honestly cannot make any sense of your "translations" of these "laws" (which sound more like assertions to me). Also, what scenario are you talking about when yo usay "after wikipedia"? There's plenty of copies of it on the internet, so the data won't suddently vanish, and wikis don't suddenly stop existing if the Wikipedia foundation implodes.
Darthy 10y ago
This sounds related to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Iron_Law_of_Bureaucracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Iron_Law_of_Bu...
- mycall 10y ago
  Opportunist in nature, Resource Control System in nurture.
- d--b 10y ago
  I love it that we turn to Wikipedia to understand its own weaknesses.
  - Cthulhu_ 10y ago
    You'd think the organization between what probably is the biggest online source of information would've learned a thing or two from its own content.
derefr 10y ago
I wonder how much of this could be counteracted simply by capping profits, such that all net revenue in excess of some fixed amount is forced by the corporate charter to be turned into either employee compensation or stockholder dividends. Sure, such a company would have no chance of succeeding in the stock market, but what if it never plans on IPOing in the first place?
- mgraczyk 10y ago
  Why would a company with mandatory dividends have no chance of succeeding?
  - derefr 10y ago
    Relative to other public companies, it basically would have have zero money to re-invest into growth. So there'd be no expectation of returns on investment—no reason to buy the stock. Dividends are nice, but dividends would stay small if the company itself stays small (because it's constrained from growing.)
    - Spooky23 10y ago
      Not all companies are growth oriented.
      - derefr 10y ago
        My point was that all publicly-traded companies are. Speculation on corporate growth's geometric effects on corporate long-term profitability is what the stock market is.
        Spooky23 10y ago
        Not at all. Look at utilities and regional banks, which are usually priced based on return on assets or operating margins. Growth oriented companies have advantages and disadvantages. Microsoft is a great example -- they have a business that's a monopoly cash cow, but they also need to hit high growth rates to prosper. They squandered a decade trying to both grow and milk the cow, and are now growing again, while breaking and eventually losing parts of the legacy business.
quotemstr 10y ago
Agreed. It's for this reason that we have to be as free as possible to create new institutions. All institutions, no matter how well-intentioned and self-aware their founders, succumb to these forces. The only way to prevent perverse misallocation of effort and resources is to allow for a steady turnover of institutions.
JBlue42 10y ago
Wow, this really hits the nail on the head in regards to the small company I work for. Expanded rapidly from 30-40 to 120 in two years. The higher-ups have failed to address some core issues (with some refused on principle, such as an aversion to stronger organizational structure due to not wanting to seem "corporate") while still pursuing pet projects and spending freely (of money and others' time). Communication is also a massive issue - half the company (within the current structure) knows what's going on, the other half have to either do their own investigative work or wait. Would fine with me if you're a much larger company but at 120 or so it seems pretty silly and hypocritical to their "anti-corporate" ethos. Will be interesting when/if we hit Dunbar's number.
- defined 10y ago
  I've worked at 3 startups. Every single one of them has (or had) the problems you describe. Is there some known principle that governs this, something that could be named along the lines of Parkinson's Law or the Peter Principle?
  - ido 10y ago
    I don't remember the source but I read about there being several inflection points in terms of team size where communication overhead changes suddenly...IIRC the first one is 8: beyond this you start needing to have 'managers' (their title may be different), i.e. people responsible for organization & team communication rather than directly making the product/sales/etc. Anecdotally I noticed that even with 5 people you usually have someone starting to act as adhoc part-time manager, and this role quickly become too much for a part time responsibility as the team grows.
- jlebrech 10y ago
  after a certain size not every person can be answerable to the big boss, you need an actually structure. you don't need to create a middle management structure from the get go, just have a chain of command.
  - Cthulhu_ 10y ago
Paul-ish 10y ago
This is from 1989, about 27 years ago. Is there any academic research on this since then?
Axiverse 10y ago
I think this problem derives from the nature of and incentives of people. What happens is that certain managers (and founders) have derived their success from pushing certain directions that have added a lot of value. Usually long term initiative take a lot of domain knowledge and a specific set of connections. When something new becomes more important, they risk losing their personal position since they may not be the best person in terms of knowledge and connection to carry out the new direction. Instead they try to use their accumulated power to keep their direction supported even when it's not in the interest of the business for as long as they can. To address this, perhaps there's merit in rewarding timely exits and somehow punishing people that have dragged things out. However the most that companies can do is usually just fire someone. And at that point they have probably sucked the company dry of the value they can personally extract.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  The only line in Buffet's quote I disagreed with was "rationality frequently wilts when the institutional imperative comes into play", and this is why. It would be awfully surprising if virtually all companies had the same problems due to smart people suddenly behaving irrationally in the same way. It's much less surprising that smart people behave rationally in their own interests, but that those interests regularly fail to align with overall company interests. And I think the pattern you describe is even mirrored on an institutional level. People are quick to mock Kodak for ignoring the rise of digital cameras, but they tend to undervalue the amount of risk that pivot would involve. If you're a world leader in product X, and that gets replaced by product Y, pivoting destroys the value of your expertise and puts you at risk. It's unpopular but perhaps sensible to settle on winding down profitably (the institutional version of a timely exit) instead of pivoting.
RichardHeart 10y ago
One solution to this problem is to impose a time limit. For instance: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (1994–projected: twenty years after the death of the survivor of Bill and Melinda) why: http://roadmap.rockpa.org/setting-a-time-horizon/ http://roadmap.rockpa.org/setting-a-time-horizon/ people that did: http://cspcs.sanford.duke.edu/time-limited-philanthropy/time-limited-foundations http://cspcs.sanford.duke.edu/time-limited-philanthropy/time...
- adventured 10y ago
  Even in that case it can become very difficult to follow. For example, there is - in my opinion - a low chance that the Gates Foundation will expend its resources within 20 years post the death of the last of the two. They are likely to have something total equivalent to (in present dollars) perhaps $250-$300 billion to get rid of in the next 40-50 years. I'd be skeptical they can get rid of it that fast in their model. They're eroding that mass of capital (presently near $190b) so relatively slowly that by the time Gates is 80, they'll probably still be dealing with $200 billion in today's dollar.
  - usrusr 10y ago
    Can a foundation create a foundation? That could "solve" the problem, from the management perspective. A succession of massive, but formally time-limited foundations, administered in lockstep by dynasties of custodians would add a very interesting touch to any future scenario of fiscal neo-feudalism.
    - CRConrad 10y ago
      Isaac Asimov wrote a whole trilogy -- which now stands at some six or eight volumes... -- based on that very idea.
golergka 10y ago
Thanks for the link. He says something else very relevant to OP's point, too: "We face another obstacle: In a finite world, high growth rates must self-destruct. If the base from which the growth is taking place is tiny, this law may not operate for a time. But when the base balloons, the party ends: A high growth rate eventually forges its own anchor."
nrdwavexe 10y ago
no, it is stupidity and venality and nepotism. capitalism is a stupid social club for jerks and retards
valar_m 10y ago
Jeff Bezos talked about something very similar in his most recent letter to shareholders[0]: "As companies get larger and more complex, there’s a tendency to manage to proxies. This comes in many shapes and sizes, and it’s dangerous, subtle, and very Day 2. A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right. Gulp. It’s not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, “Well, we followed the process.” A more experienced leader will use it as an opportunity to investigate and improve the process. The process is not the thing. It’s always worth asking, do we own the process or does the process own us? In a Day 2 company, you might find it’s the second." [0] https://www.amazon.com/p/feature/z6o9g6sysxur57t https://www.amazon.com/p/feature/z6o9g6sysxur57t
- josteink 10y ago
  It's probably off-topic and I'd hate to derail the discussion, but could you outline what you mean with a "Day 2 company"? It's not immediately clear to me, and as such makes an otherwise good-looking argument feel less "solid".
  - sinxoveretothex 10y ago
    Well, seeing as the nomenclature is not the parent commenter's but Bezos's and seeing as how it's literally explained in the third paragraph of the link said commenter gave, I think there's little to explain.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - khazhou 10y ago
      He had some nerve asking a question, instead of reading the entire linked document!
dood 10y ago
This will be very familiar to readers of The Systems Bible [1], which expounds in great depth about the above problems and potential mitigation strategies. The basic takeaway is that these behaviours and forces are natural, intrinsic and inevitable; that a wise systems-manager will seek to carefully manage them rather than oppose or decry them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics

by cs702 10y ago

mycall 10y ago

28 years ago, I wonder how much if this still holds true for Berkshire Hathaway.

daviddumenil 10y ago
NASA might offer a more salient comparison.

mboto 10y ago

Thats a really interesting quote, I hadn't heard of it before today. Do you have any resources that talk of how to organise and combat this?

qntty 10y ago
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-the-conquest-of-bread https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-the-c...
- jessedhillon 10y ago
  Is this a response suggesting that anarchy is the only way to defeat institutional inertia? Or a link to something that actually addresses the subject constructively and realistically? I ask because it's a large work, but I'd read it if it was the latter.
  - qntty 10y ago
    Of course there's many ways to solve any problem, but GP asked for a resource, and I gave one. Anarchy has been used realistically, and the book was written to be a realistic approach organizing people.
  - alxndr 10y ago
    I was also curious; here's what Wikipedia says about Kropotkin's "The Conquest of Bread": > "In this work, Kropotkin points out what he considers to be the defects of the economic systems of feudalism and capitalism, and how he believes they thrive on and maintain poverty and scarcity, as symbol for richness and in spite of being in a time of abundance thanks to technology, while promoting privilege. He goes on to propose a more decentralised economic system based on mutual aid and voluntary cooperation, asserting that the tendencies for this kind of organisation already exist, both in evolution and in human society. He also talks about details of revolution and expropriation in order not to end in a reactionary way." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conquest_of_Bread https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conquest_of_Bread
carsongross 10y ago
I have seen this problem first hand in a startup. I theorize that it is related to size/scale, which disassociates causes and effects across time and groups. My solution is to keep companies as small as possible

VLM 10y ago

A better more original source of pithy organizational rules would be Robert Conquests three laws of politics Everyone is conservative about what he knows best. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies. If you transform Conquest's rules from politics to running (ruining?) the wikipedia, the transformed rules are "We can change nothing not even our exponential growth spiral, not our policies, nothing" "LOL We're not doing the fiscal conservatism thing. I like how the current top discussion is about popularity and the need for a circular firing squad, not something financial. A direct quote of an attempt to avoid working on the issues "I'm reminded of the inflammatory, low-rent campaign of Donald Trump." Yeah buddy that'll fix it, that'll fix it real good." "We're headed off the financial cliff now get out of the way I'm going gas pedal to the floor as you can see in the exponential graphs. The problem is we're a CRUD app and that's cutting edge CS just like quantum computing so naturally there's no possibility of criticism there. After all, the Egyptians didn't have flush toilets and they built a pyramid, so any criticism of the toilet in my bathroom is either making fun of the entire Egyptian culture or pretending the pyramids were not a logistical challenge." There is some humor in that the world of paper encyclopedia publishing ran on mostly capitalist operational principles for decades, centuries. It turns out that running an online encyclopedia off donations and extreme hand waving is powerful enough to destroy an industry on its way to its inevitable collapse. Maybe someday in the future we'll have encyclopedias again, but the era after wikipedia and before the next encyclopedia will be a bit of a dark age. That's too bad.

vanderZwan 10y ago
I honestly cannot make any sense of your "translations" of these "laws" (which sound more like assertions to me). Also, what scenario are you talking about when yo usay "after wikipedia"? There's plenty of copies of it on the internet, so the data won't suddently vanish, and wikis don't suddenly stop existing if the Wikipedia foundation implodes.

Darthy 10y ago

This sounds related to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Iron_Law_of_Bureaucracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Iron_Law_of_Bu...

mycall 10y ago
Opportunist in nature, Resource Control System in nurture.
d--b 10y ago
I love it that we turn to Wikipedia to understand its own weaknesses.
- Cthulhu_ 10y ago
  You'd think the organization between what probably is the biggest online source of information would've learned a thing or two from its own content.

derefr 10y ago

I wonder how much of this could be counteracted simply by capping profits, such that all net revenue in excess of some fixed amount is forced by the corporate charter to be turned into either employee compensation or stockholder dividends. Sure, such a company would have no chance of succeeding in the stock market, but what if it never plans on IPOing in the first place?

mgraczyk 10y ago
Why would a company with mandatory dividends have no chance of succeeding?
- derefr 10y ago
  Relative to other public companies, it basically would have have zero money to re-invest into growth. So there'd be no expectation of returns on investment—no reason to buy the stock. Dividends are nice, but dividends would stay small if the company itself stays small (because it's constrained from growing.)
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    Not all companies are growth oriented.
    - derefr 10y ago
      My point was that all publicly-traded companies are. Speculation on corporate growth's geometric effects on corporate long-term profitability is what the stock market is.
      - Spooky23 10y ago
        Not at all. Look at utilities and regional banks, which are usually priced based on return on assets or operating margins. Growth oriented companies have advantages and disadvantages. Microsoft is a great example -- they have a business that's a monopoly cash cow, but they also need to hit high growth rates to prosper. They squandered a decade trying to both grow and milk the cow, and are now growing again, while breaking and eventually losing parts of the legacy business.

quotemstr 10y ago

Agreed. It's for this reason that we have to be as free as possible to create new institutions. All institutions, no matter how well-intentioned and self-aware their founders, succumb to these forces. The only way to prevent perverse misallocation of effort and resources is to allow for a steady turnover of institutions.

JBlue42 10y ago

Wow, this really hits the nail on the head in regards to the small company I work for. Expanded rapidly from 30-40 to 120 in two years. The higher-ups have failed to address some core issues (with some refused on principle, such as an aversion to stronger organizational structure due to not wanting to seem "corporate") while still pursuing pet projects and spending freely (of money and others' time). Communication is also a massive issue - half the company (within the current structure) knows what's going on, the other half have to either do their own investigative work or wait. Would fine with me if you're a much larger company but at 120 or so it seems pretty silly and hypocritical to their "anti-corporate" ethos. Will be interesting when/if we hit Dunbar's number.

defined 10y ago
I've worked at 3 startups. Every single one of them has (or had) the problems you describe. Is there some known principle that governs this, something that could be named along the lines of Parkinson's Law or the Peter Principle?
- ido 10y ago
  I don't remember the source but I read about there being several inflection points in terms of team size where communication overhead changes suddenly...IIRC the first one is 8: beyond this you start needing to have 'managers' (their title may be different), i.e. people responsible for organization & team communication rather than directly making the product/sales/etc. Anecdotally I noticed that even with 5 people you usually have someone starting to act as adhoc part-time manager, and this role quickly become too much for a part time responsibility as the team grows.
jlebrech 10y ago
after a certain size not every person can be answerable to the big boss, you need an actually structure. you don't need to create a middle management structure from the get go, just have a chain of command.
- Cthulhu_ 10y ago

Paul-ish 10y ago

This is from 1989, about 27 years ago. Is there any academic research on this since then?

Axiverse 10y ago

I think this problem derives from the nature of and incentives of people. What happens is that certain managers (and founders) have derived their success from pushing certain directions that have added a lot of value. Usually long term initiative take a lot of domain knowledge and a specific set of connections. When something new becomes more important, they risk losing their personal position since they may not be the best person in terms of knowledge and connection to carry out the new direction. Instead they try to use their accumulated power to keep their direction supported even when it's not in the interest of the business for as long as they can. To address this, perhaps there's merit in rewarding timely exits and somehow punishing people that have dragged things out. However the most that companies can do is usually just fire someone. And at that point they have probably sucked the company dry of the value they can personally extract.

Bartweiss 10y ago
The only line in Buffet's quote I disagreed with was "rationality frequently wilts when the institutional imperative comes into play", and this is why. It would be awfully surprising if virtually all companies had the same problems due to smart people suddenly behaving irrationally in the same way. It's much less surprising that smart people behave rationally in their own interests, but that those interests regularly fail to align with overall company interests. And I think the pattern you describe is even mirrored on an institutional level. People are quick to mock Kodak for ignoring the rise of digital cameras, but they tend to undervalue the amount of risk that pivot would involve. If you're a world leader in product X, and that gets replaced by product Y, pivoting destroys the value of your expertise and puts you at risk. It's unpopular but perhaps sensible to settle on winding down profitably (the institutional version of a timely exit) instead of pivoting.

RichardHeart 10y ago

One solution to this problem is to impose a time limit. For instance: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (1994–projected: twenty years after the death of the survivor of Bill and Melinda) why: http://roadmap.rockpa.org/setting-a-time-horizon/ http://roadmap.rockpa.org/setting-a-time-horizon/ people that did: http://cspcs.sanford.duke.edu/time-limited-philanthropy/time-limited-foundations http://cspcs.sanford.duke.edu/time-limited-philanthropy/time...

adventured 10y ago
Even in that case it can become very difficult to follow. For example, there is - in my opinion - a low chance that the Gates Foundation will expend its resources within 20 years post the death of the last of the two. They are likely to have something total equivalent to (in present dollars) perhaps $250-$300 billion to get rid of in the next 40-50 years. I'd be skeptical they can get rid of it that fast in their model. They're eroding that mass of capital (presently near $190b) so relatively slowly that by the time Gates is 80, they'll probably still be dealing with $200 billion in today's dollar.
- usrusr 10y ago
  Can a foundation create a foundation? That could "solve" the problem, from the management perspective. A succession of massive, but formally time-limited foundations, administered in lockstep by dynasties of custodians would add a very interesting touch to any future scenario of fiscal neo-feudalism.
  - CRConrad 10y ago
    Isaac Asimov wrote a whole trilogy -- which now stands at some six or eight volumes... -- based on that very idea.

golergka 10y ago

Thanks for the link. He says something else very relevant to OP's point, too: "We face another obstacle: In a finite world, high growth rates must self-destruct. If the base from which the growth is taking place is tiny, this law may not operate for a time. But when the base balloons, the party ends: A high growth rate eventually forges its own anchor."

nrdwavexe 10y ago

no, it is stupidity and venality and nepotism. capitalism is a stupid social club for jerks and retards

valar_m 10y ago

Jeff Bezos talked about something very similar in his most recent letter to shareholders[0]: "As companies get larger and more complex, there’s a tendency to manage to proxies. This comes in many shapes and sizes, and it’s dangerous, subtle, and very Day 2. A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right. Gulp. It’s not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, “Well, we followed the process.” A more experienced leader will use it as an opportunity to investigate and improve the process. The process is not the thing. It’s always worth asking, do we own the process or does the process own us? In a Day 2 company, you might find it’s the second." [0] https://www.amazon.com/p/feature/z6o9g6sysxur57t https://www.amazon.com/p/feature/z6o9g6sysxur57t

josteink 10y ago
It's probably off-topic and I'd hate to derail the discussion, but could you outline what you mean with a "Day 2 company"? It's not immediately clear to me, and as such makes an otherwise good-looking argument feel less "solid".
- sinxoveretothex 10y ago
  Well, seeing as the nomenclature is not the parent commenter's but Bezos's and seeing as how it's literally explained in the third paragraph of the link said commenter gave, I think there's little to explain.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - khazhou 10y ago
    He had some nerve asking a question, instead of reading the entire linked document!

dood 10y ago

This will be very familiar to readers of The Systems Bible [1], which expounds in great depth about the above problems and potential mitigation strategies. The basic takeaway is that these behaviours and forces are natural, intrinsic and inevitable; that a wise systems-manager will seek to carefully manage them rather than oppose or decry them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics