Interestingly I'd attribute the ability for firms to grow ever larger to engineering. There have been more and more improvements over the past 5-10 years that a

Interestingly I'd attribute the ability for firms to grow ever larger to engineering. There have been more and more improvements over the past 5-10 years that allow a decoupling between business groups so they can work effectively together with fewer coordination costs. Basically everything SOA, means business units are easier to manage because the interfaces they consume from other business units are better standardized and the tools to consume them are better. Basically, executives aren't getting better. The tools that the employees that work for those executives are, so much so that the employees no longer need to go through the command and control hierarchy to get things done across business units. See: Steve Yegge's Amazon Platform Rant: https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX Google Protobufs https://code.google.com/p/protobuf/ https://code.google.com/p/protobuf/ Facebook's Thrift https://thrift.apache.org/ https://thrift.apache.org/ ... and all the other SOA enabling technologies the reduce transaction costs* stemming from coordination. * http://www3.nccu.edu.tw/~jsfeng/CPEC11.pdf http://www3.nccu.edu.tw/~jsfeng/CPEC11.pdf