It's been a long time (5 years?) since I encountered this last. Despite the idea making total sense to me, I am no clearer than I was then on how to actually do this in any org I have been a part of or managed. Where does this work? How did you do it? Does it work?
I've worked on both sides and I really think it comes down to Dunbar's number [1] and thus the size of the company.
At a sufficiently small company, you can just trust people will generally do the right thing. I ask X to accomplish some compliance goal, I just trust that they'll do it right.
As the company scales, you actually know a smaller and smaller portion of the people you work with. You no longer just trust that they'll do the right thing, because you don't know them. You fix the lack of trust by adding processes that ensure the "right thing" happens, but each of those processes is a friction point. Eventually you have so many of those processes that they become the majority of the effort for a project.
That gets exacerbated by the usual turnover. People pissed off by all the processes they have to comply with will leave, and people who love having their own fiefdom will stay and double down.
That all ends in the evergreen stupidity of "spend $1,800 to have 12 people who make $150/hr argue about whether this app really needs a $5/month Aurora database".
That's a personal pet peeve, but is emblematic of the issue imo. Trust has broken down so severely that the company is willing to spend more than the lifetime cost of compute for the app to vet whether it's "necessary".
A similar vein is the "platform team" where all they do is take an open source project and wrap it in a custom DSL, so you get all the complexity and none of the searchability of the original project, plus the features are almost always a subset. I can't tell you how many times I've looked for solutions to a problem, found a snippet that will fix it, and then had to reverse engineer how to make a stupid DSL output that config.
An aspect that’s missing from this analysis is that in militaries and in tech startups a “squad” or “two-pizza team” are empowered to make decisions for their local domain because they have the real-time context. I have personally found the decentralized decision authority that happens with matrix-style management to be a much higher coordination overhead than the top-down or bottom-up axis described here.
An autonomous team that does what they are told or an autonomous team is free to pursue opportunities as they see fit are both useful and can react quickly. The question is how much scaled alignment you need to achieve a particular goal.
You can’t invade a country with one squad of 10,000 soldiers or 1,000 squads of 10 that do as they please. You need to delegate execution authority to small teams who are aligned to a shared goal.
Similarly, you can’t expect one group 10,000 devs with internal structure to explore and find interesting opportunities to explore; you’ll just get noise. Nor can you try to manage 10,000 devs directly. You’ll won’t be to manage the context.
Complexity management in organizations follows the same patterns as in code. Single responsibility, don’t repeat yourself too much, encapsulation, etc.
It’s really a function of information theory, the more people you have to ramp up or keep current on context, the lower your ability to make and stick to decisions.
I don't think it's "funny" . But AI has brought it up to the discussion. In human organizations the decision makers make it so it benefits them. But with AI it is possible to design the whole delegation-structure by anybody who designs agent-collaboration.
So its becoming more obvious that AI can actually help big corporations organize their command-structure with the help of AI to produce more profits. The boards should take notice. Does it really help produce more value if most of it goes to the CEO?
I don't think the author is really super familiar with some of those other organizations he mentions so he's reflecting how he thinks they work rather than how they work. That said the observations are still pretty good.
> You need to delegate execution authority to small teams who are aligned to a shared goal
It's been a while since I read the slides but this is basically what the author is advocating for and what doesn't tend to happen in dysfunctional organizations.
> Complexity management in organizations follows the same patterns as in code. Single responsibility, don’t repeat yourself too much, encapsulation, etc.
There are a lot of parallels. But organizations have people so that's an extra factor. You can't just "refactor" them without thinking about people's egos, objectives and such. So a lot of thought is needed into how to build effective organizations and sadly not enough thought is given is most companies.
Thanks for the thoughtful write-up. I’m currently working on a journal article about optimizing organizations from first principles, starting with optimized delegation. Would love your thoughts on the paper if you’re willing to take a look.
These are two public previews that we are building off of for the journal:
Is there a version of this that doesn't force me to click through slides with very little content on each one, as if I were in kindergarten? To whoever wrote this: I can read.
It’s clearly a presentation. If you want a different representation, point an LLM at it and ask it to transcribe and rewrite in the form you prefer. I just tried with ChatGPT and it works fine. Retrieve the PDF link (ChatGPT will generate a working link for you - session tied I think). Then proceed to do what you must with it.
Many tools are available today to alter data representation. And frontier LLMs have high fidelity. You don’t have to wait for someone to help you. Claude helps those who help themselves.
Obviously. It was so easy it took me seconds to verify before posting. But that's fine. It's Sunday morning and I will give you an alternative version that is immune to prompt-ineptness. Cunningham's Law shall not be denied today.
It conveniently created a .txt file and also expanded the text into a full article.
I then asked: "create another version that is just the text from each slide. nothing more"
Result:
----------
Many successful organizations pride themselves on moving quickly to tackle problems.
But over time, they start to feel way, way slower.
Accomplishing previously simple things feels like it takes forever.
You likely aren’t imagining it, by the way!
This happens in every successful organization over time.
Clearly someone is doing something wrong.
Perhaps there’s some villain who is messing everything up.
If we figure out whose fault it is, we should get them to knock it off!
Unfortunately, there is no villain.
It’s no one’s fault… and not something any one person can fix.
There’s a hidden force that makes life in successful organizations increasingly miserable.
It’s invisible, so we either don’t see it... or we at least pretend not to.
But the force is inescapable and affects everything that happens within an organization.
The force is the coordination headwind.
This force emerges on its own.
No one created it.
No one is doing it on purpose.
Things in your organization may have gotten orders of magnitude harder,
but everyone pretends they’re still as easy as they used to be.
To understand what this force is and why it arises,
we’re going to have to apply some unfamiliar tools.
Strap in, this is going to get weird!
Slime Molds and Militaries
Bottom-Up Top-Down
Organizations come in many different types, and different types work differently.
One important dimension is bottom-up vs top-down.
Bottom-Up Top-Down
The stereotypical example of top-down is a military. The hierarchy is rigid and formal.
Subordinates are expected to do precisely what their superior tells them to.
(Of course, even real life militaries, especially nowadays, don’t work like this in practice.)
Bottom-Up Top-Down
The stereotypical example of a bottom-up organization is a slime mold.
A number of different independent actors make individual decisions,
leading to complex emergent behavior in the colony.
Side note: slime molds are amazing! Here’s a slime mold deriving the Tokyo rail network.
These types of systems are called complex adaptive systems, and they can model many things,
like ecological ecosystems, software ecosystems, economies, politics, and more!
Bottom-Up Top-Down
Unpredictable Predictable
Uncontrollable Controllable
Individual autonomy Cog in the machine
Fluid Structured
Messy Efficient
Resilient Fragile
Explore Exploit
The two different extremes have very different properties.
Some good, some... not so good.
Bottom-Up Top-Down
There’s a spectrum between these two extremes,
with most organizations falling somewhere in the middle.
Bottom-Up Top-Down
A typical large corporation in an established,
slow-moving industry tends to be farther to the right.
Bottom-Up Top-Down
Tech companies stand out by being farther to the left, some much farther to the left.
Thriving in ambiguity. Rewarding autonomy and moving fast. Adapting quickly.
Bottom-Up Top-Down
This is a key part of today’s tech industry culture.
It’s enabled by technology, allowing fluid coordination on demand.
Many industries are increasingly trying to emulate it.
Many organizations today are basically a slime mold.
The Coordination Headwind
Let’s get back to that bad outcome.
How does it come about?
We’re going to see how these bad outcomes arise even if we assume every individual is
hard-working, great at what they do, and extremely collaborative.
How is that possible?
When organizations are very small, individu...
There’s a lot that’s good here, but you just can’t be slime molds in a modern capitalist corporation.
A substantial portion of company goals is set by a very small group that is far removed from the day to day work, and the goals are often connected to timelines and financial expectations well before any team member gets into the project.
To have slime mold like behavior, a corporation would have to hire employees, give them time and resources, and general guidelines and goals, but let specific targets and projects bubble up.
This is fundamentally incompatible with a next-quarter profit driven corporate financial structure.
True. This was written with the context of Google which was, to a large extent and up until very recently, a good example of the resilience and magic a slime mold can be.
It is not true today, and as you mentioned "fundamentally incompatible with a next-quarter profit driven.."
I recommend reading The Art of Action by Stephen Bungay on this particular topic.
A line in this presentation about loosely coupled, highly aligned teams is a major idea straight out of this book.
I saw some questions in threads here about how to achieve this: unfortunately, I have no bulletproof answers on this front, because what I've seen in practice is that large teams really like to talk about ideas/read books/get training on all these great ideas, then pantomime some of the behaviors from source material, then give up shortly thereafter without actually achieving results and only adding to the chaos and dysfunction.
In my experience, it takes hard organizational resets to achieve new results, with either major leadership shakeups or senior leadership truly, completely, deeply buying into a new way of doing things and seeing it through; such successful transformations have been a very rare occurrence across my career.
I am unfortunately living through "what not to do" when you have a messy bottom-up style organisation. Our org has been messy but culture has been good and progress has been steady, but not fast enough or predictable enough for the new big boss that came in last year. As a result, he has gone all in on a new way of doing things which involved hiring a new delivery lead to establish a process for the whole (several hundred strong) organisation to follow. Naturally all this has done is add more headwind, reduce ownership and morale, and upset the vast majority of our people. Last week they announced a RTO mandate in an attempt to fix morale by having people collaborate more closely. People have never been more upset. It's actually quite sad watching a great place to work devolve into a hellscape over the course of a single year.
What is extremely valuable in slime mold organizations is clear direction from above on the relative importance of different objectives.
This doesn't have to be very specific - senior people often aren't in a position to decide on specifics. But even very general feedback can help the rank and file cut through "what should we do?" disagreements. In my experience those disagreements drain productivity faster than anything.
It's interesting to fit my own experience into this - one of the biggest projects I worked on was created by this sort of coordination failure that got so big that it threatened millions of dollars in revenue.
It wasn't even that technical of a problem to solve, it was just making sure that everyone was on the same page for everything so that when we executed the solution it wouldn't explode in our faces.
I guess this is why in big tech, you level up in your politics skills much more thatn you do in your technical skills, but in startups you level up the technical skills much more.
This is a Google deck as mentioned elsewhere. What's not mentioned is the quality of employees involved in the decision making.
Consider Google's first few hundred employees - people like Urs, Susan W, Marissa M. People chosen by Larry and Sergey for a mix of high impact qualities that made early Google what it is.
Now consider employee #200,000 chosen by employee #180,000 based on some dry rubrick. It's a completely different caliber of person requiring a different amount of coordination.
If you could create a company of 200k Susans, Marissa's, and Urses it would be kne thing. But thats obviously not possible. So size itself is a factor because of how you can get to that size to begin with.
The other problem is that even if there were 200k such employees, there wouldn’t be enough power to go around to contain it and also their skill isn’t necessarily anything to do with IC talent.
The author uses the military as an example of top down and that is true in many cases.
However, after reading the book Corps Business [0] about the United States Marine Corps, you realize that they are VERY big into having a top level mission but almost all of the decision making is pushed down to the lowest levels. In fact, if they do move decision making up the chain, it's usually for non-combat reason e.g. organizing the mess halls is moved up, how should we take that hill is moved "down" and closer to the front line troops.
Several of the other threads have mentioned "but how do we become those orgs??" and my best answer is just to read the book.
NOTE: the book was written in the late 1990s so there are some parts that are dated but the overall concepts are still sound.
The US military does a lot of things right. But not every concept matches over to the world of business.
A tremendous amount of time / money is spent on developing talent. There are way too many officers just for supervision; they are there so that leadership can be practiced, and just as important, so the next levels leaders can be selected. 'up or out' is what makes this work. You can't do this in a business.
(in peacetime) there is no cost of failure. The military can afford to learn. You can't do that in a business.
The book has value. I have read it. But there are several mis alignments across the problem domains.
> The military can afford to learn. You can't do that in a business.
are you literally saying that businesses cannot afford to learn?
Businesses must afford to learn. Under capitalism, that's the job description. Those that fail to learn... just fail.
The entire reason for the existence of a market is to provide information. Buyers and consumers exchange information, coming to an agreed market price, if you're out of the loop, sorry. This was capitalism in 1790. This is still capitalism in 2026. Not much has changed in that regard.
The military can piss away millions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of hours, and it is not an existential situation. Oh, we bought an airplane that is broken 1/2 of the time vs. the 10% of the time we budgeted for. No big deal. A business where an investment failed like that would be in trouble. In the military, they just take that as a lesson and move on (we shouldn't buy that again, or we should not use that process the next time).
Likewise with people. Hire someone, train them for 6 months, find out they cannot do the work. The military will retrain that person. Most businesses can deal with situations like that without going broke. If you ever have a spare hour, research how the Navy selects commanding officers for aircraft carriers. The select 5 for each future opening. All highly qualified pilots with demonstrated leadership potential. Then they send them to Nuclear school. 1 Year. Then another school for a year. One or two might get a carrier XO slot, one of those will get a command. The others, they just retire them. Crazy investment. No business would do that.
> The military can piss away millions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of hours, and it is not an existential situation.
Meta and it's pursuit of VR would like to have a word.
> Crazy investment. No business would do that.
My dad was in a management training program in the 1980s that sound very much like you are describing. e.g. 100s of people start the program for maybe 20-30 slots. Everyone went through the same process for fairness and to identify who should move on.
I treat any organizational theory that has a unidimensional view - like coordination is a good-to-bad slime mold – as incompetent, or at worst, corporate sabotage.
Any active product or business development - builds product/domain/operational depth. That depth feeds back into every decision.
Without taking into account that depth, complexity, competence of Managers and Employees in that depth, headcount invested into automation, etc, just focusing unidimensionally on some behavioral or organizational methodology, IMHO, makes it worse.
It gives CxOs some cute stories to blame someone or something against. If your coordination is slow, then there is a reason behind it. Find it.
52 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 9.2 ms ] threadI think the ideas are solid but it's the C-suite that needs to deal with this and rarely cares. In other words, it's about organizational culture.
At a sufficiently small company, you can just trust people will generally do the right thing. I ask X to accomplish some compliance goal, I just trust that they'll do it right.
As the company scales, you actually know a smaller and smaller portion of the people you work with. You no longer just trust that they'll do the right thing, because you don't know them. You fix the lack of trust by adding processes that ensure the "right thing" happens, but each of those processes is a friction point. Eventually you have so many of those processes that they become the majority of the effort for a project.
That gets exacerbated by the usual turnover. People pissed off by all the processes they have to comply with will leave, and people who love having their own fiefdom will stay and double down.
That all ends in the evergreen stupidity of "spend $1,800 to have 12 people who make $150/hr argue about whether this app really needs a $5/month Aurora database".
That's a personal pet peeve, but is emblematic of the issue imo. Trust has broken down so severely that the company is willing to spend more than the lifetime cost of compute for the app to vet whether it's "necessary".
A similar vein is the "platform team" where all they do is take an open source project and wrap it in a custom DSL, so you get all the complexity and none of the searchability of the original project, plus the features are almost always a subset. I can't tell you how many times I've looked for solutions to a problem, found a snippet that will fix it, and then had to reverse engineer how to make a stupid DSL output that config.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
An autonomous team that does what they are told or an autonomous team is free to pursue opportunities as they see fit are both useful and can react quickly. The question is how much scaled alignment you need to achieve a particular goal.
You can’t invade a country with one squad of 10,000 soldiers or 1,000 squads of 10 that do as they please. You need to delegate execution authority to small teams who are aligned to a shared goal.
Similarly, you can’t expect one group 10,000 devs with internal structure to explore and find interesting opportunities to explore; you’ll just get noise. Nor can you try to manage 10,000 devs directly. You’ll won’t be to manage the context.
Complexity management in organizations follows the same patterns as in code. Single responsibility, don’t repeat yourself too much, encapsulation, etc.
It’s really a function of information theory, the more people you have to ramp up or keep current on context, the lower your ability to make and stick to decisions.
Funnily enough it’s extremely relevant to agents/subagents.
So its becoming more obvious that AI can actually help big corporations organize their command-structure with the help of AI to produce more profits. The boards should take notice. Does it really help produce more value if most of it goes to the CEO?
I don't think the author is really super familiar with some of those other organizations he mentions so he's reflecting how he thinks they work rather than how they work. That said the observations are still pretty good.
> You need to delegate execution authority to small teams who are aligned to a shared goal
It's been a while since I read the slides but this is basically what the author is advocating for and what doesn't tend to happen in dysfunctional organizations.
> Complexity management in organizations follows the same patterns as in code. Single responsibility, don’t repeat yourself too much, encapsulation, etc.
There are a lot of parallels. But organizations have people so that's an extra factor. You can't just "refactor" them without thinking about people's egos, objectives and such. So a lot of thought is needed into how to build effective organizations and sadly not enough thought is given is most companies.
These are two public previews that we are building off of for the journal:
1. https://paragraph.com/@hq.spengrah/an-actionable-model-of-tr...
2. https://x.com/hatsprotocol/status/1986458735095517526
Many tools are available today to alter data representation. And frontier LLMs have high fidelity. You don’t have to wait for someone to help you. Claude helps those who help themselves.
1. Visit the embedded google slides URL https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1XMCU2vxtxxqqQ2NY567n...
2. Click File
3. Scroll down to 'Download' and point your cursor at it and wait for the submenu to open
4. Select PDF Document
5. Upload the PDF Document to your chat agent of choice
Not everyone is able to type the following and get results, but I'm built different:
> Summarize this for me: https://komoroske.com/slime-mold/
> It’s a google slides thing but i don’t want to click through
Here. Scroll bar included so you can see it's literally the only prompt https://imgur.com/a/Qela4qt
edit: upon it outputting a summary, asking it to reproduce as continuous prose it refuses.
One shotting and asking not to summarize it complies? I hate this world sometimes.
it's available here tho: https://nathancheng.fyi/03-Records/Clippings/Coordination+He...
It conveniently created a .txt file and also expanded the text into a full article.
I then asked: "create another version that is just the text from each slide. nothing more"
Result:
----------
Many successful organizations pride themselves on moving quickly to tackle problems.
But over time, they start to feel way, way slower. Accomplishing previously simple things feels like it takes forever.
You likely aren’t imagining it, by the way! This happens in every successful organization over time.
Clearly someone is doing something wrong. Perhaps there’s some villain who is messing everything up. If we figure out whose fault it is, we should get them to knock it off!
Unfortunately, there is no villain. It’s no one’s fault… and not something any one person can fix.
There’s a hidden force that makes life in successful organizations increasingly miserable. It’s invisible, so we either don’t see it... or we at least pretend not to. But the force is inescapable and affects everything that happens within an organization.
The force is the coordination headwind.
This force emerges on its own. No one created it. No one is doing it on purpose.
Things in your organization may have gotten orders of magnitude harder, but everyone pretends they’re still as easy as they used to be.
To understand what this force is and why it arises, we’re going to have to apply some unfamiliar tools. Strap in, this is going to get weird!
Slime Molds and Militaries
Bottom-Up Top-Down Organizations come in many different types, and different types work differently. One important dimension is bottom-up vs top-down.
Bottom-Up Top-Down The stereotypical example of top-down is a military. The hierarchy is rigid and formal. Subordinates are expected to do precisely what their superior tells them to. (Of course, even real life militaries, especially nowadays, don’t work like this in practice.)
Bottom-Up Top-Down The stereotypical example of a bottom-up organization is a slime mold. A number of different independent actors make individual decisions, leading to complex emergent behavior in the colony.
Side note: slime molds are amazing! Here’s a slime mold deriving the Tokyo rail network. These types of systems are called complex adaptive systems, and they can model many things, like ecological ecosystems, software ecosystems, economies, politics, and more!
Bottom-Up Top-Down Unpredictable Predictable Uncontrollable Controllable Individual autonomy Cog in the machine Fluid Structured Messy Efficient Resilient Fragile Explore Exploit The two different extremes have very different properties. Some good, some... not so good.
Bottom-Up Top-Down There’s a spectrum between these two extremes, with most organizations falling somewhere in the middle.
Bottom-Up Top-Down A typical large corporation in an established, slow-moving industry tends to be farther to the right.
Bottom-Up Top-Down Tech companies stand out by being farther to the left, some much farther to the left. Thriving in ambiguity. Rewarding autonomy and moving fast. Adapting quickly.
Bottom-Up Top-Down This is a key part of today’s tech industry culture. It’s enabled by technology, allowing fluid coordination on demand. Many industries are increasingly trying to emulate it.
Many organizations today are basically a slime mold.
The Coordination Headwind
Let’s get back to that bad outcome. How does it come about?
We’re going to see how these bad outcomes arise even if we assume every individual is hard-working, great at what they do, and extremely collaborative.
How is that possible? When organizations are very small, individu...
You can download it in various forms as well, such as txt. Won't fix the tone, but at least it's scannable.
A substantial portion of company goals is set by a very small group that is far removed from the day to day work, and the goals are often connected to timelines and financial expectations well before any team member gets into the project.
To have slime mold like behavior, a corporation would have to hire employees, give them time and resources, and general guidelines and goals, but let specific targets and projects bubble up.
This is fundamentally incompatible with a next-quarter profit driven corporate financial structure.
It is not true today, and as you mentioned "fundamentally incompatible with a next-quarter profit driven.."
A line in this presentation about loosely coupled, highly aligned teams is a major idea straight out of this book.
I saw some questions in threads here about how to achieve this: unfortunately, I have no bulletproof answers on this front, because what I've seen in practice is that large teams really like to talk about ideas/read books/get training on all these great ideas, then pantomime some of the behaviors from source material, then give up shortly thereafter without actually achieving results and only adding to the chaos and dysfunction.
In my experience, it takes hard organizational resets to achieve new results, with either major leadership shakeups or senior leadership truly, completely, deeply buying into a new way of doing things and seeing it through; such successful transformations have been a very rare occurrence across my career.
This doesn't have to be very specific - senior people often aren't in a position to decide on specifics. But even very general feedback can help the rank and file cut through "what should we do?" disagreements. In my experience those disagreements drain productivity faster than anything.
It wasn't even that technical of a problem to solve, it was just making sure that everyone was on the same page for everything so that when we executed the solution it wouldn't explode in our faces.
I guess this is why in big tech, you level up in your politics skills much more thatn you do in your technical skills, but in startups you level up the technical skills much more.
Consider Google's first few hundred employees - people like Urs, Susan W, Marissa M. People chosen by Larry and Sergey for a mix of high impact qualities that made early Google what it is.
Now consider employee #200,000 chosen by employee #180,000 based on some dry rubrick. It's a completely different caliber of person requiring a different amount of coordination.
If you could create a company of 200k Susans, Marissa's, and Urses it would be kne thing. But thats obviously not possible. So size itself is a factor because of how you can get to that size to begin with.
However, after reading the book Corps Business [0] about the United States Marine Corps, you realize that they are VERY big into having a top level mission but almost all of the decision making is pushed down to the lowest levels. In fact, if they do move decision making up the chain, it's usually for non-combat reason e.g. organizing the mess halls is moved up, how should we take that hill is moved "down" and closer to the front line troops.
Several of the other threads have mentioned "but how do we become those orgs??" and my best answer is just to read the book.
NOTE: the book was written in the late 1990s so there are some parts that are dated but the overall concepts are still sound.
0 - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000W94FFU?lv=shuf&channelId=500&r...
A tremendous amount of time / money is spent on developing talent. There are way too many officers just for supervision; they are there so that leadership can be practiced, and just as important, so the next levels leaders can be selected. 'up or out' is what makes this work. You can't do this in a business.
(in peacetime) there is no cost of failure. The military can afford to learn. You can't do that in a business.
The book has value. I have read it. But there are several mis alignments across the problem domains.
are you literally saying that businesses cannot afford to learn?
Businesses must afford to learn. Under capitalism, that's the job description. Those that fail to learn... just fail.
The entire reason for the existence of a market is to provide information. Buyers and consumers exchange information, coming to an agreed market price, if you're out of the loop, sorry. This was capitalism in 1790. This is still capitalism in 2026. Not much has changed in that regard.
The military can piss away millions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of hours, and it is not an existential situation. Oh, we bought an airplane that is broken 1/2 of the time vs. the 10% of the time we budgeted for. No big deal. A business where an investment failed like that would be in trouble. In the military, they just take that as a lesson and move on (we shouldn't buy that again, or we should not use that process the next time).
Likewise with people. Hire someone, train them for 6 months, find out they cannot do the work. The military will retrain that person. Most businesses can deal with situations like that without going broke. If you ever have a spare hour, research how the Navy selects commanding officers for aircraft carriers. The select 5 for each future opening. All highly qualified pilots with demonstrated leadership potential. Then they send them to Nuclear school. 1 Year. Then another school for a year. One or two might get a carrier XO slot, one of those will get a command. The others, they just retire them. Crazy investment. No business would do that.
Meta and it's pursuit of VR would like to have a word.
> Crazy investment. No business would do that.
My dad was in a management training program in the 1980s that sound very much like you are describing. e.g. 100s of people start the program for maybe 20-30 slots. Everyone went through the same process for fairness and to identify who should move on.
Any active product or business development - builds product/domain/operational depth. That depth feeds back into every decision.
Without taking into account that depth, complexity, competence of Managers and Employees in that depth, headcount invested into automation, etc, just focusing unidimensionally on some behavioral or organizational methodology, IMHO, makes it worse.
It gives CxOs some cute stories to blame someone or something against. If your coordination is slow, then there is a reason behind it. Find it.
Just follow the money or whatever is the top incentive.