There are multiple dimensions to the credibility question. You probably should increase your credence from prior to reading it/about it that large organizations very often have more severe misalignment than you thought. You probably should recognize that the model of middle-management internal competition has some explanatory power.
You probably should NOT go all the way to believing that the corporate world is homogeneously broken in exactly this way. I don’t think he makes that claim, but it’s what a lot of readers seem to take. There’s plenty of variation, and the Anna Karenina principle applies (paraphrased): well-functioning organizations are alike; disfunctional organizations are each broken in their own way. But really, it’s wrong too—each group is actually distinct, and has distinct sets of forces that have driven it to whatever pathologies or successes it has. Even when there are elements that appear very similar, they have different causes and likely different solutions or coping mechanisms.
“is most of the world dominated by moral mazes”? I don’t think this is a useful framing. Most groups have some elements of Moral Mazes. Some groups appear dominated by those elements, in some ways. From the outside, most groups are at least somewhat effective at their stated mission, so the level of domination is low enough that it hasn’t killed them (though there are certainly “zombie orgs” which HAVE been killed, but don’t know it yet).
There are multiple dimensions to the credibility question. You probably should increase your credence from prior to reading it/about it that large organizations very often have more severe misalignment than you thought. You probably should recognize that the model of middle-management internal competition has some explanatory power.
You probably should NOT go all the way to believing that the corporate world is homogeneously broken in exactly this way. I don’t think he makes that claim, but it’s what a lot of readers seem to take. There’s plenty of variation, and the Anna Karenina principle applies (paraphrased): well-functioning organizations are alike; disfunctional organizations are each broken in their own way. But really, it’s wrong too—each group is actually distinct, and has distinct sets of forces that have driven it to whatever pathologies or successes it has. Even when there are elements that appear very similar, they have different causes and likely different solutions or coping mechanisms.
“is most of the world dominated by moral mazes”? I don’t think this is a useful framing. Most groups have some elements of Moral Mazes. Some groups appear dominated by those elements, in some ways. From the outside, most groups are at least somewhat effective at their stated mission, so the level of domination is low enough that it hasn’t killed them (though there are certainly “zombie orgs” which HAVE been killed, but don’t know it yet).