There are a couple of points that come to mind. First, management needs to be judicious about how problems get solved. Does it require committee? Or a lone acto

There are a couple of points that come to mind. First, management needs to be judicious about how problems get solved. Does it require committee? Or a lone actor? Which department should own it or should the CEO take it on personally? Second, there is no doubt that an organizational approach to problem solving is going to change as a company scales. The path the information took in this parable likely was from customer service to upper management to engineering. A CEO that will accept an $8M solution to such a problem is probably running a multi-billion dollar company. If this had been a $50 million company, no way he would have felt satisfied that it was money well spent.