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The key diff from feudalism proper is that you don’t own your assets or have political autonomy. You’re an agent of the next level up leader and serve at his pleasure. Creates very different dynamics.
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One theory of Mughal decline was that it was due to replacement of a proper feudal model (jagirdari system) with a more satrap type system (mansabdari system) by Akbar. Exacerabetes personal profiteering motives. Same happens in overly strong satrapy companies.
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When you can’t pass on your wins to your children (= favored crony-proteges in corps) and could be moved around like a chess piece arbitrarily, and potentially killed or fired for a failure somebody above manages to blame you for, the incentive to make bank while you can ruses.
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Worst case: everybody above VP is watching stock value and vesting cliffs with hawk eyes, they know they could get blamed and axed arbitrarily for the next fuck-up, the managers below don’t expect them to stick around long anyway. So you solve for lucrative exit not legacy.
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The result is, the theater of individual accountability chains actually creates conditions where nobody can actually build, manage, or lead at all, and everybody is looking for the smart exit moment. So risks of failure actually increase.
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Is it worth 10xing failure rate simply so there’s always someone you can blame? Sometimes yes. When the environment is chaotic and illegible, and knowledge is too hard to codify into systems. Which means the person with the right tacit knowledge in their head is priceless.
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Under such conditions the system is stupid, the right barbarian wins, so you should keep firing the wrong people till you find the right person with an uncanny win percentage. And you do that up and down the stack. This actually kinda worked ~1980-2010. Hobbesian barbarian world.
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TIL about Quaker management 🤓
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Replying to @vgr
It’s the slow and steady—and safe and robust—committee work approach taken to the level of trying to make the right¹ decision for this generation, rather than this day, week, month, quarter, year, or even decade. See qfp.quaker.org.uk/passage/3-04/ et seq. — ¹ right ≈ the will of God
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I think Covid caused Satrapy failures AND committee failures all over the world. Neither systemic knowledge nor tacit barbarian knowledge proved entirely adequate despite all the cross-accusations. And both had successes as well.
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State responses worked to the extent long-term pandemic preparedness — committee stuff — produced capabilities that hadn’t been decimated by privatization. Also original R&D into mRNA etc was committee world. Points to committee world. Bad messaging, slow responses… points off.
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Satrapy world gets points for Zoom, rapid rewiring of broken supply chains, high speed transition to remote work, improv mask production, rapid vaccine dev from the basic science. Points docked for running way too lean, profiteering, stealing PPP, terrible worker conditions.
And yeah, DAOs are promising as a synthesis mode, but most people I hear rhapsodize about them seem to have zero experience managing anything of consequence with or without them, in either satrapy or committee mode. They’re code-happy. So I’m just observing for now.
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The core problem is psychological, social and epistemic. Not tech. Satrapies solve for special Great Man approaches and they mostly turn out to be ordinary egotists or have feet of clay. Committees solve for ordinary people approaches and stifle genuine greatness where it exists.
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My bias is towards ordinary because I think most people are ordinary, including me. The percentage of genuinely great people (either intrinsic or circumstantial) is overstated by a factor of 10,000x especially in the US. For every Steve Jobs there are 9999 Elizabeth Holmeses.
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Fun fact, thus thread inspired by mild annoyance at the proliferation of useless collective nouns in English which got ne thinking about the opposite phenomenon where we erase genuine distinctions between collective forms.
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The real collective noun for everything is “bunch”
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I’ll leave you with a factoid. There’s 2 collective nouns for geese. A gaggle is when they’re on the ground, a skein is when they’re in the air. In this case, it’s a useful distinction.
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Yet another thing to file under “thing I’d turn into a course if I had time off from making money to develop one”
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