The tl;dr is that complexity of society requires many people and skillsets (cognitive and otherwise) to manage that complexity, and a lot of wealth is generated by people who are good at this. Coordination problems are real problems and the default for complex societies. The Dilbert model of society is implicitly one where engineers and... See more

My goal is to structure teams around minimizing “coordination headwind,” as described by Alex Komoroske in this deck on seeing organizations as slime mold. The rough idea is that coordination costs (caused by uncertainty and disagreements) increase with scale, and adding managers doesn’t improve things. People’s incentives become misaligned. People... See more

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