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Criticisms of groupthink and other anti-patterns are funny to me because they presume that if people only had access to these valuable insights they would chang

Criticisms of groupthink and other anti-patterns are funny to me because they presume that if people only had access to these valuable insights they would change. Organizational anti-patterns are rarely broken, they work for someone, and someone's salary depends on sustaining that dissonance. The work in large organizations is to achieve outcomes within the broken and inconsistent rules of their internal logic, so as to preserve the integrity of them, and not the outcomes themselves. The essence of being a geek, nerd, or technologist is to focus on the outcomes and problem solving to achieve them, whereas the essence of being typical is to be a working part of the system to sustain it, independent of it's outcomes. Warren Buffett said, "I try to invest in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will." To me, the point of a startup is to defect from these dissonance machines and create something people actually want. Viewed this way, a startup is not a business. It's like an anti-business that gets absorbed by a business and releases stored potential revenue in the collision. Groupthink might be more of a sign than a problem. It's possible that it is a sign of the growth stage of a business and whether it's ready to absorb something, or just be hollowed out in some long term private equity cost optimization hell.

asdfman123 7y ago
It's easy to be cynical but I believe some corporate cultures are far healthier than others. I believe lots of companies try to avoid the HiPPO effect (deferring to highest paid person's opinion) with varying success. I worked for a few years at Shell though and now I'm wary of ever working for a large corporation again. The sweet spot I've found is mid-sized companies, where they're small enough where they can't just absorb the costs of useless software projects, but big enough where there isn't the mad scramble to ship. (I've never worked for a startup, though, so apologies if that's an unfair characterization.)
- growlist 7y ago
  > I worked for a few years at Shell though and now I'm wary of ever working for a large corporation again I didn't find them that bad tbh, I think that there's good parts and bad parts in all monsters like Shell - my take was that their size, heritage and criticality to the global economy has resulted in them developing certain bureaucratic traits akin to a governmental civil service, but even with that said they do some amazing stuff (which most civil services cannot get anywhere near) - and I worked with probably the smartest IT pros I've met in my career. They operate a massive global IT infrastructure at scale and they do it pretty well, with some aspects being indisputably world-leading.
  - asdfman123 7y ago
    Oh yeah, definitely. Shell is not a office but a zillion offices spread throughout the globe. Probably my main problem was I worked for the data management department where the most experienced people were semi-technical and had geoscience backgrounds. Intelligent people, but internal software tools were still very new to them and many were still doing things they did in the 80s.
    - growlist 7y ago
      One of my favourite Shell memories is when Outlook malfunctioned and sent an email to thousands of people in error, many of whom then also replied saying 'me too' to an initial reply-all email that said 'I got this email in error'. It happened several times until the CIO was forced to send a company wide email saying 'Please don't reply all when you receive an email in error, it takes several days processing for Outlook to catch up'.
Nasrudith 7y ago
Antipattern criticism seems more as a warning to others who aren't invested in failure as often the practitioners are too far gone in preserving their own egos over changing their course. The "self-sustance" of the system is insanity akin to chopping down walls for firewood, never building new ones (while inefficient that would at least be a way of wear cycling) and then once they are left on a dirt lot bemoaning it was unforeseeable yet inevitable.

asdfman123 7y ago

It's easy to be cynical but I believe some corporate cultures are far healthier than others. I believe lots of companies try to avoid the HiPPO effect (deferring to highest paid person's opinion) with varying success. I worked for a few years at Shell though and now I'm wary of ever working for a large corporation again. The sweet spot I've found is mid-sized companies, where they're small enough where they can't just absorb the costs of useless software projects, but big enough where there isn't the mad scramble to ship. (I've never worked for a startup, though, so apologies if that's an unfair characterization.)

growlist 7y ago
> I worked for a few years at Shell though and now I'm wary of ever working for a large corporation again I didn't find them that bad tbh, I think that there's good parts and bad parts in all monsters like Shell - my take was that their size, heritage and criticality to the global economy has resulted in them developing certain bureaucratic traits akin to a governmental civil service, but even with that said they do some amazing stuff (which most civil services cannot get anywhere near) - and I worked with probably the smartest IT pros I've met in my career. They operate a massive global IT infrastructure at scale and they do it pretty well, with some aspects being indisputably world-leading.
- asdfman123 7y ago
  Oh yeah, definitely. Shell is not a office but a zillion offices spread throughout the globe. Probably my main problem was I worked for the data management department where the most experienced people were semi-technical and had geoscience backgrounds. Intelligent people, but internal software tools were still very new to them and many were still doing things they did in the 80s.
  - growlist 7y ago
    One of my favourite Shell memories is when Outlook malfunctioned and sent an email to thousands of people in error, many of whom then also replied saying 'me too' to an initial reply-all email that said 'I got this email in error'. It happened several times until the CIO was forced to send a company wide email saying 'Please don't reply all when you receive an email in error, it takes several days processing for Outlook to catch up'.

Nasrudith 7y ago

Antipattern criticism seems more as a warning to others who aren't invested in failure as often the practitioners are too far gone in preserving their own egos over changing their course. The "self-sustance" of the system is insanity akin to chopping down walls for firewood, never building new ones (while inefficient that would at least be a way of wear cycling) and then once they are left on a dirt lot bemoaning it was unforeseeable yet inevitable.