Honestly saying no is one of the most important things either a startup or large company can have. Saying no gracefully, respectfully, and having the receiving

Honestly saying no is one of the most important things either a startup or large company can have. Saying no gracefully, respectfully, and having the receiving person understand the rational is the hard part. This is one of the function of "fellows", "Senior Members of the Technical Staff", "Principal Architects" or whatever your org calls it and the people selected for that should be excellent at it. I guess the problem the author points out is that is the only thing a person might do and that is not good. Folks in this position should also know how to say yes and build buyin from business people/exec/program management. Most organizations fail horribly at saying no. Instead they try to silo things to cope. This works to some extent, and you will always have silos as a company grows up, but you really should never end up with 12 programming languages, 5 RDBMS, 4 NoSQL DBs, 3 Javascript frameworks, 3 CIs, 3 cluster schedulers and then all the aforementioned also duplexed across organization units. That level of sprawl reduces margins, increases onboarding time, stresses even the most experienced staff, and makes adaption and business decision making murky at best.