7 ms·

Coordination Headwind: How Organizations Are Like Slime Molds

174 points by rzk 17d ago

beardedwizard 17d ago
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?
- YZF 17d ago
  IIRC the slides are from Google. I 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.
  - pstuart 17d ago
    My overly simplistic take: it's all about incentives. Usually they are structured in ways that can be gamed and the structure is defined by those that benefit most from them being gamed. But then again, this is a view from the underbelly of corporate life and I may be missing something.
    - yowayb 17d ago
      Simple but true. I think some famous people said something about this. I think true from every vantage point. I think this is also very compatible with the parent post. Some leadership are not very good at creating good incentives. Actually, I've never been in leadership but I suspect it's also just really hard and there's potentially external factors that obviate even the best incentives.
  - janpeuker 17d ago
    Yep mentioned in the original thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31727144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31727144
- everforward 17d ago
  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. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
  - Ozzie-D 17d ago
    [flagged]
narnarpapadaddy 17d ago
An aspect that’s missing from this analysis is distributed vs centralized decision authority. 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. The decentralized decision authority that happens with matrix-style management is a much higher contributor to 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 execute 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 no 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 won’t be able to grok 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.
- aleksiy123 17d ago
  Managing complexity while scaling is a concept just keeps reappearing. Funnily enough it’s extremely relevant to agents/subagents.
  - galaxyLogic 17d ago
    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?
- YZF 17d ago
DonHopkins 17d ago
Harvesting, cooking, and eating Dog Vomit Slime Mold: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfbLSl_4o78 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfbLSl_4o78
pdonis 17d ago
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.
- arjie 17d ago
  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.
  - xgulfie 17d ago
    I don't have a chatgpt subscription and I'm not getting one
    - wild_egg 17d ago
      Don't all the major ones have free tiers now? Pretty sure you can do this direct from the Google results pages even
      - pinkgolem 17d ago
        The free one in Google has major hallucinations..
  - knollimar 17d ago
    Did you even try this? my claude refused, giving me some copyright-without-mentioning-copyright bs.
    - arjie 17d ago
      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. 1. Visit the embedded google slides URL https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1XMCU2vxtxxqqQ2NY567nFwsG6sZW9ed3aF8LgjDxPro/edit 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/ 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 https://imgur.com/a/Qela4qt
randomImmigrant 17d ago
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.
- hackeryogi 17d ago
  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.."
patrickmay 17d ago
Great content, horrible presentation. This would be much more useful as a document, not a deck.
jodacola 17d ago
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.
- momento 16d ago
  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.
deleted 17d ago
[deleted]
afpx 17d ago
Also true at the macro level. Human civilization and infrastructure resembles slime mold from space. Also, apparently the cosmic web: https://news.ucsc.edu/2020/03/cosmic-web/ https://news.ucsc.edu/2020/03/cosmic-web/
marsten 17d ago
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.
jubilanti 17d ago
sounds like a lot of words and strained metaphors for https://enwp.org/Brooks's_law https://enwp.org/Brooks's_law
kylepomykala 17d ago
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.
kwhitlock 17d ago
Totally get this. Been on projects where the 'leader' was just the nutrient source everyone was blindly flowing towards.
xyzelement 17d ago
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.
- vlovich123 17d ago
  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.
copperwire 17d ago
Ah, the distributed amoeba problem. Explains so much about why top-down mandates often just get absorbed into the existing blob.
alexpotato 17d ago
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. 0 - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000W94FFU?lv=shuf&channelId=500&ref_=KC_GS_GB_US&plpRedirect=mhFallback https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000W94FFU?lv=shuf&channelId=500&r...
- wmeredith 17d ago
  This is also a core tenant in Ender's game.
- derektank 17d ago
  Yes, decentralized execution of commander’s intent is the bread and butter of military operations, at least in the Air Force.
- budman1 16d ago
  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.
  - perrygeo 15d ago
    > 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.
ironqcold 17d ago
[flagged]
rdsubhas 16d ago
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.
jussy 16d ago
Slime mould requires food. Just follow the money or whatever is the top incentive.

174 points by rzk 17d ago

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?

YZF 17d ago
IIRC the slides are from Google. I 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.
- pstuart 17d ago
  My overly simplistic take: it's all about incentives. Usually they are structured in ways that can be gamed and the structure is defined by those that benefit most from them being gamed. But then again, this is a view from the underbelly of corporate life and I may be missing something.
  - yowayb 17d ago
    Simple but true. I think some famous people said something about this. I think true from every vantage point. I think this is also very compatible with the parent post. Some leadership are not very good at creating good incentives. Actually, I've never been in leadership but I suspect it's also just really hard and there's potentially external factors that obviate even the best incentives.
- janpeuker 17d ago
  Yep mentioned in the original thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31727144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31727144
everforward 17d ago
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. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
- Ozzie-D 17d ago
  [flagged]

narnarpapadaddy 17d ago

An aspect that’s missing from this analysis is distributed vs centralized decision authority. 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. The decentralized decision authority that happens with matrix-style management is a much higher contributor to 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 execute 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 no 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 won’t be able to grok 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.

aleksiy123 17d ago
Managing complexity while scaling is a concept just keeps reappearing. Funnily enough it’s extremely relevant to agents/subagents.
- galaxyLogic 17d ago
  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?
YZF 17d ago

DonHopkins 17d ago

Harvesting, cooking, and eating Dog Vomit Slime Mold: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfbLSl_4o78 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfbLSl_4o78

pdonis 17d ago

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.

arjie 17d ago
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.
- xgulfie 17d ago
  I don't have a chatgpt subscription and I'm not getting one
  - wild_egg 17d ago
    Don't all the major ones have free tiers now? Pretty sure you can do this direct from the Google results pages even
    - pinkgolem 17d ago
      The free one in Google has major hallucinations..
- knollimar 17d ago
  Did you even try this? my claude refused, giving me some copyright-without-mentioning-copyright bs.
  - arjie 17d ago
    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. 1. Visit the embedded google slides URL https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1XMCU2vxtxxqqQ2NY567nFwsG6sZW9ed3aF8LgjDxPro/edit 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/ 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 https://imgur.com/a/Qela4qt

randomImmigrant 17d ago

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.

hackeryogi 17d ago
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.."

patrickmay 17d ago

Great content, horrible presentation. This would be much more useful as a document, not a deck.

jodacola 17d ago

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.

momento 16d ago
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.

deleted 17d ago

[deleted]

afpx 17d ago

Also true at the macro level. Human civilization and infrastructure resembles slime mold from space. Also, apparently the cosmic web: https://news.ucsc.edu/2020/03/cosmic-web/ https://news.ucsc.edu/2020/03/cosmic-web/

marsten 17d ago

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.

jubilanti 17d ago

sounds like a lot of words and strained metaphors for https://enwp.org/Brooks's_law https://enwp.org/Brooks's_law

kylepomykala 17d ago

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.

kwhitlock 17d ago

Totally get this. Been on projects where the 'leader' was just the nutrient source everyone was blindly flowing towards.

xyzelement 17d ago

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.

vlovich123 17d ago
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.

copperwire 17d ago

Ah, the distributed amoeba problem. Explains so much about why top-down mandates often just get absorbed into the existing blob.

alexpotato 17d ago

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. 0 - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000W94FFU?lv=shuf&channelId=500&ref_=KC_GS_GB_US&plpRedirect=mhFallback https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000W94FFU?lv=shuf&channelId=500&r...

wmeredith 17d ago
This is also a core tenant in Ender's game.
derektank 17d ago
Yes, decentralized execution of commander’s intent is the bread and butter of military operations, at least in the Air Force.
budman1 16d ago
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.
- perrygeo 15d ago
  > 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.

ironqcold 17d ago

[flagged]

rdsubhas 16d ago

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.

jussy 16d ago

Slime mould requires food. Just follow the money or whatever is the top incentive.