I’ve worked with good/bleeding edge centralized hierarchical orgs and the entire philosophy of good management can be boiled down to “do what Amazon does.”
It’s amazing how far ahead they are of state of the art MBA theories of good management, at least at that scale.
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I’ve only recently started working with good *decentralized* orgs (first paid gig was this year) and my prelimary conclusion: flip almost everything you think is correct about centralized hierarchy management by default. And best if you flip the *best* playbook: Amazon’s.
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Is anyone seriously aiming to build decentralized orgs that win in the marketplace against centralized ones? I thought people liked decentralization because it’s ~nicer.
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It depends on what you mean by 'decentralization'. Delegation of authority (Druckerian decentralization) has been a cornerstone of management theory since at least the early 20th century. General Groves mastery of it was what allowed the Manhattan Project to succeed.
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Before Drucker it was called "mission command", and there's plenty of literature on how it works.
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No mission command is *not* what I’m talking about. Devolution and autonomy within a larger centralized structure is well within normal centralized management models.
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What *are* you talking about then? I can't imagine something that lacks a centralized intent is going to be very efficient.
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What various discord based DAO like things are trying to create mostly, many open source project ecosystems outside the core etc. It’s new because the enabling tech is new. Some mission command stuff carries over, esp boydian flavors.
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Efficiency is not the point. I suspect longevity is. Market competition is not the right frame. Competition with states/governance entities is more meaningful
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Yep, this is a big part. Curators try to expose the surface of available work (curation itself bring one kind) and people kinda self-select to do stuff and there’s automation that helps manage redundancy and quality and under-resourcing


