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In many organizations, we can become bogged down by the short-term and the actions with instrumental value: what does this task require and what will it get us? Or each employee simply becomes so busy or specialized that they do not have the bandwidth to explore more broadly at an individual level.

I think the single biggest problem afflicting large companies is the difficulty of assigning a value to each person's work.

Engineering organizations today have ballooned to huge numbers of people, but these huge engineering organizations don’t exactly have a reputation for high velocity output. Some of this is the result of what happens with products at scale: it is just fundamentally faster and easier to iterate, improve, or change a product with 100 users than it is ... See more

The very distinct problem of organisational bloat and diseconomy of scale with hiring people is apparent here. Instead of having 1:1s with their direct report, management tells employees to write daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly reports listing what they’ve been doing. Not to mention the inefficiencies caused by hiring - it takes time to get n... See more

With the innovation of the org chart McCallum eased the tradeoff between scale and efficiency that many organizations face as they grow. This new ‘operating system’ for firms operates even more effectively in modern times by leveraging the internet, but the tradeoff between scale and efficiency has not gone away. Structures and processes that work ... See more