6 Comments

Correct.

As organizations get larger there is more desire for status seekers to get to the top of it and more places for them to hide low performance.

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At a somewhat larger size orgs start to work with team where knowledge sharing and e.g. pair programming become the norm (by explicitl establishing that or by people learning over time which kinds of organizations work over the long term and is becomes professional best practice).

I am not familar with the next level up though.

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This reminds me of lectures from Robert Gibbons on relational contracts and the hold up problem.

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Seems to be a matter of slow process conform vs fast pragmatic problem solving approach. Also if the project manager had taken the confrontational way of handling this, he might have lost Sam and his apparently good ideas for future updates of the project. It is a balance between keeping your experts happy and enforcing strict processes according to protocol. Also with digitalisation reaching more aspects of org life, i.e. git for change tracking of code, this divide between the two approaches might not be as wide as before.

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Why assume that we are learning more about managing lrge organizations with time? The inflation adjusted cost of producing and distributing a can of Coca Cola has risen by over 100% in the last 30 years. To me that strongly suggests that even in the best case examples our large organizations become less efficient with time.

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Perhaps some problems like this get worse as orgs get larger but not always the case. Larger orgs tend to have more process and if situations like this are recurrent and important, they can get addressed more proactively as part of processes or guidelines. Eg, standard terms & conditions, supplier qualification requirements.

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