4 ms·

Is a company with tens of thousands of employees really one man's project?

• nicoburns 5y ago
  Yes and no. Obviously other people are involved. But it's driven by one man. One man gets to decide the direction and has ultimate control. This is clearly a very different situation to for example the case of 2 companies with 5000 employees or 4 companies with 2500 employees, or even 2000 companies with 5 employees. Those cases would all allow for much more variation in approach, and this in turn would allow much greater scope for market feedback from consumers to affect the development of the products offered.
  • zaphar 5y ago
    One man gets to decide the direction and has ultimate control. This is one of those statements that sounds pithy and is theoretically correct but in practice. The person at the top has far less control than people think they do and it's incredibly difficult to wield what control they do have with any kind of precision or accuracy. What actually happens is the the organization is full of people who attempt to do what they think they are inferring the people above them want and the result is an aggregation of all those little inferences of varying quality and accuracy. The bigger the organization the less control the person at the top actually has.
    • nicoburns 5y ago
      It's still very difficult for someone working under someone else to work in a direction that there superior is outright opposed to. For example, imagine someone at Facebook wanting to take a pro-privacy stance. They might be able to have some impact, but they're going to be overruled and undermined at every turn, whereas if there were a competitor with a staunchly pro-privacy leader / leadership team then that would be very different.