"Perhaps this is at the heart of what's wrong with most big firms." I think the list makes a lot more sense if you apply it to small companies. Not necessarily

"Perhaps this is at the heart of what's wrong with most big firms." I think the list makes a lot more sense if you apply it to small companies. Not necessarily startups, but companies of less than, say, 30 or 40 people. Big companies seem to need to protect themselves against incompetence in ways that small companies do not. So they create more tightly defined roles and Procedures Which Must Be Adhered To, which preclude employees ignoring job descriptions, grate against eccentricities, and are not amenable to fiddling. If you have a significant fraction of these 8 qualities, I suspect you'll be happier at a small company.