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Understanding how bureaucracy develops

(dhruvmethi.substack.com)
192 points dhruvmethi | 1 comments | 17 Oct 24 14:32 UTC | HN request time: 0.497s | source
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nine_zeros ◴[18 Oct 24 19:20 UTC] No.41882581[source]▶
This is a very well written article. And I firmly agree with this from first-hand experience.

Organizational malleability is key. But it wouldn't work in FAANG style standardized performance review style of work.

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dhruvmethi ◴[19 Oct 24 10:29 UTC] No.41886968[source]▶
Agreed - as organizations scale, it's like some kind of fundamental law of thermodynamics that says they must become more bureaucratic in order to remain competitive. I think it's because organizations can only work at scale if they minimize the variance of each individual business unit, and malleability threatens that. I still think that good enough leadership and communication should allow for malleable units to coexist well together, but that may be a naive ideal.
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1. shadowmanifold ◴[20 Oct 24 15:33 UTC] No.41895991[source]▶
I would think there is some kind of information entropy and scaling laws at work.

It could all be represented by a graph but it is a huge measurement problem.

Minimize the variance of what with a business unit? It is not clear to me there is one measure that would apply across business units. I suspect that is part of the problem and something that gets amplified with scale.