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Notes -
I don't know about video games, but I think this point is often misunderstood.
Rockefeller didn't start by asking for 39 drops of solder. He asked for 38. When that wasn't enough, he asked for 39.
By the same token, Elon Musk is known to cut all the fat and some of the flesh. Only by cutting live tissue can you be sure that all the fat is truly gone. If you haven't experienced at least some problems due to cutting too many people, then you haven't cut deeply enough.
We've been talking about Musk's management ability, and to prove I'm not sucking his dick I started thinking about the failure modes that will eventually break his personal control of his companies.
His cutting is vulnerable to Yellowstoning, where managers deliberately hurt performance or use cuts as an excuse to avoid responsibility. Right now Musk can personally show up at the office with an audit team to instantly fire a guy he suspects of doing that. But as the org expands and the hierarchies deepen and interlink, internal politics will hurt his ability to excise a bad actor who's spent all his time schmoozing with management.
Worse, his harsh strategies incentivize internal politicking and backchannel dealing among management to mutually reinforce their positions. It's like overusing an anti-parasite drench on a flock: you're accelerating resistance buildup.
(Even worse, the kind of internal politics most effective at subversion through parallel management cadres is the bioleninism of the party that's made him a priority target and allocated massive resources to seizing his companies. I'm expecting some manufactured hysteria along the lines of "Elon Musk Fired LGBT Rocket Scientist Whistleblower For Supporting Environmental Justice Over Rocket Noise Harming Endangered Birds: Harris Administration pledges to arrest him for hate crimes." And if that sounds crazy to anyone, they're nuts for forgetting the exact same scenario played out with Timnet Gebru and google)
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Yeah, that's explained right up front in the linked article.
That's certainly the MBA way. It is my growing suspicion, however, that if you've successfully cut all the fat, you have deprived your organization of something essential to its lasting and meaningful success--maybe it's a margin of error, maybe it's "play in the joints," I've seen many metaphors and probably none entirely captures the phenomenon, but it seems clear to me that corporate hyper-efficiency is objectionably likely to generate short-term numbers-go-up at long term expense to the organization, its people, and even often the general public.
You can't expect someone to read an article as table stakes for engaging with your comment. Same for those who link youtube videos.
Surely expecting to read the first paragraph of an article isn’t too much…
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This is the motte. Asking someone to read a 10k word article is table stakes, just don't link "video essays"
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