I think some of the most successful big companies are ones that have figured out how to significantly reduce coordination costs. For example, Amazon's extreme i

I think some of the most successful big companies are ones that have figured out how to significantly reduce coordination costs. For example, Amazon's extreme insistence on small teams and coordinating through interfaces[0] seems like something that might make individual teams less productive, but cause coordination costs to scale linearly instead of quadratically. Similarly, Facebook has a ton of emphasis on decentralization. This leads me to believe that at large companies, you should heavily prioritize decentralization and low coordination costs to the expense of almost anything else. One reason companies fail to do this is trying to avoid redundancy: having two teams work on the same thing seems like a waste. But if you need to add a communication node to avoid redundancy, that's often not worth it. [0]: https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX