"In fact, one approach is to intentionally over optimize a local optimization. This will often make apparent to management (or even to you) where the true bottle neck in the system is. We shouldn't worry so much about doing the wrong things righter, but we should be aware that that may be the case and always work to be doing the right things.

In the end, showing improvement and building momentum can lead to exciting changes. In fairness, it can also come crashing to the ground if the right kinds of changes aren't made at some point, but this should not deter anyone who thinks something can be made better from trying to do so and it certainly should not be a reason to do nothing!"

"The Peter principle has been recently investigated by means of an agent-based simulation and its validity has been numerically corroborated. It has been confirmed that, within certain conditions, it can really influence in a negative way the efficiency of a pyramidal organization adopting meritocratic promotions. It was also found that, in order to bypass these effects, alternative promotion strategies should be adopted, as for example a random selection choice. In this paper, within the same line of research, we study promotion strategies in a more realistic hierarchical and modular organization and we show the robustness of our previous results, extending their validity to a more general context. We discuss also why the adoption of these strategies could be useful for real organizations."

Routine Matters: New Foundations for the Study of Recurring Organizational Action Patterns

"When producing a movie, everything stems back to this box: IDEA. In the 1940s, these were the sources of ideas: "Play," "Short Story or Novel," "Newspaper Story or Current Event," "Original Story," "Magazine Article," or "Historical Incident." Way off on the left, however, there's one additional source that's not shown above: "Vice President in Charge of Production." If you want something unoriginal done that isn't in print or in the history books, go talk to the VP, he'll get it done. On another note: this particular flowchart is one of the few places the words "Restaurants," "Mimeograph," "Arsenal," "Publicity," and "Bits & Extras" fit together so well. From the 20th Century Fox flowcharts collection."

"When you see a stupid policy, don’t assume a stupid person created it. It may have been the decision of a very intelligent person. It probably sounded like a good idea at the time given the motivating circumstances. Maybe it was a good idea at the time. But the letter lives on after the spirit dies. You can make a game out of this. When you run into a stupid policy, try to imagine circumstances that would have motivated an intelligent person to make such a policy. The more stupid the policy, the more challenging the game.

Large organizations will accumulate stupid policies like scar tissue over time. It’s inevitable. Common sense doesn’t scale well.

The scar tissue metaphor reminds me of Michael Nielsen metaphor of organizational immune systems. Nielsen points to organizational immune systems as one factor in the decline of newspapers. The defense mechanisms that allowed newspapers to thrive in the past are making it difficult for them to survive now."

"The basic problems didn't appear until individual rap groups exhausted the virtues of consciousness-raising and decided they wanted to do some- thing more specific. At this point they usually floundered because most groups were unwilling to change their structure when they changed their task. Women had thoroughly accepted the idea of 'structurelessness' without realising the limitations of its uses. People would try to use the 'structureless' group and the informal conference for purposes for which they were unsuitable out of a blind belief that no other means could possibly be anything but oppressive."

Surrounded by fierce rivals, Reed Hastings keeps the troops motivated with hefty compensation and luxe perks, including lots of time off