Why Organizations Slow Down as They Get Larger

4min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

As organizations get larger, people specialize more. If you're a tiny startup, like focusing on optimizing just one little button or one little feature probably doesn't make sense because there's so many important things to do. And then when you get to a really larger organization like Google, you might literally have a person whose job is to handle just one page on one particular product that's super, super specialized. I think that generalists are super useful in these kind of contexts. But how can you inject a little bit of randomness into that?

Read the full transcript here.

Why do organizations get slower as they grow? What can organizations learn from slime molds? What are the advantages of top-down organization versus bottom-up organization, and vice versa? How can organizations encourage serendipity? What use are doorbells in jungles? Why is it so hard for organizations to set a "north star" that is at once plausible, coherent, and good?

Alex Komoroske has over a decade of experience in the tech industry as a product manager focusing on platform- and ecosystem-shaped problems. While at Google, he worked on Chrome's Web Platform PM team, Augmented Reality in Google Maps, and Ambient Computing. He's fascinated by how to navigate the emergent complexity within organizations to achieve great results. You can find some of his public writing at komoroske.com.

Staff