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Notes -
But an organisation can't do all the things its component employees can.
Toy example: Alice is a stubborn science expert; Bob is a stubborn humanities expert; as individuals, they are capable of answering questions about their respective areas of expertise, but as AliceBobCo they squabble and can't come to an agreement on any question. The company is dumber than the sum of its parts.
(The key point is that even though the company has employees that possess the skills it needs, it lacks sufficient structure to yoke "the will of the organisation" to that individual's skills.)
I agree that a Steinbeck + lackeys is more competent than just a Steinbeck! — just not in a way that merits "superintelligence". It's not a qualitative step up; you don't get Steinbeck^2, you just get Steinbeck with some minor amps. There seems to be a power cliff of generating a great writer in the first place, and our only recipe for adding that capability to an organisation is "employ a great writer".
I think you're underestimating what people mean by "people aren't perfectly coordinated". It sounds like you think they mean the intelligence of an org scales like O(ln(N)) or something (i.e. making an org 100 times bigger makes it only 10 times smarter). I think it's more like: making an org 100 times bigger probably makes the org as a whole dumber, but capable of massively more work and some related benefits (that are sorta intelligence-related but not the whole thing). I.e. it's not "orgs are superintelligences but beneath the danger threshold", it's "orgs are subintelligences connected to massively powerful but dumb machinery".
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