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Unscalable Orgs
My friend Byron Davies sent me a link to this 3 minute MIT Media Lab video in which associate Media Lab Director Andy Lippman challenges us to recognize four common flaws plaguing all of our institutions. Obtaining a new awareness and understanding of the plague is the first step toward meaningful redesign.
According to Lippman, the top four reasons for organizational decline are:
- They’re out of scale – they’ve grown too big to perform in accordance with their original design
- They’re monocultures – they all act the same
- They’re opaque – nobody from within or without understands how they freakin’ work
- They’ve lost their original mission – A summation of the previous three reasons.
Because of the pervasive institutional obsession for growth, Lippman seems to think that solving the scaling problem through the development of nested communities is the most promising strategy for halting the decline.
Categories: management
bureaucracy, business, company culture, hierarchy, linkedin, organizational behavior
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Bulldozer00's Blog 
Good video. One of the institutions that could be seen a poster child for this problem are the secondary schools in the US. High schools in particular. Last century there was move to centralize high schools for cost and “flexibility”. They have grown too large and bureaucratic. Where some schools are graduating a much smaller percentage then is acceptable. The administrators use too many excuses. They are in great need of nested communities (smaller logical high schools) to get the graduation rates back up. Bill Gate of M$ fame is a big proponent of this.
Hi Ray,
I always admired Bill Gates, even during the time period when he was branded as Darth Vader by millions.