The post is rather long. In short, however, I don’t think that your Kingdom metaphor works, because large bureaucracies are big *not* because they have many mini-kingdoms doing similar things in parallel, but because they need to specialize and allow cross-functional collaboration, which requires lots of management.
So I’ve updated a bit about the kingdom metaphor, but I don’t think that particular critique feels right to me – competent people are rare, and this is just as important whether you need someone to oversee a new department (i.e. your startup now needs to hire an actual legal team and you need someone you can trust to make sure they’re aligned with you, i.e. specialization), or you if you’re opening up on a new store in another city (parallelization). Either way, alignment/competence are limited and bottlenecking.
My claim is that *competence* isn’t the critical limiting factor in most cases because structure doesn’t usually allow decoupling, not that it’s not limited. When it IS the limiting factor, I agree with you, but it rarely is. And I think alignment is a different argument.
In EA orgs, alignment can solve the delegation-without-management problem because it can mitigate principal-agent issues. Once we agree on goals, we’re working towards them, and we can do so in parallel and coordinate only when needed. In most orgs, alignment cannot accomplish this, because it’s hard to get people to personally buy into your goals when those goals are profit maximization for a company. (Instead, you use incentive structures like bonuses to align them. But then you need to monitor them, etc.)
On your points about scaling, I mostly agree, but want to note that there are fundamental issues with scaling that I explained in a post here: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/03/17/go-corporate-or-go-home/
The post is rather long. In short, however, I don’t think that your Kingdom metaphor works, because large bureaucracies are big *not* because they have many mini-kingdoms doing similar things in parallel, but because they need to specialize and allow cross-functional collaboration, which requires lots of management.
So I’ve updated a bit about the kingdom metaphor, but I don’t think that particular critique feels right to me – competent people are rare, and this is just as important whether you need someone to oversee a new department (i.e. your startup now needs to hire an actual legal team and you need someone you can trust to make sure they’re aligned with you, i.e. specialization), or you if you’re opening up on a new store in another city (parallelization). Either way, alignment/competence are limited and bottlenecking.
My claim is that *competence* isn’t the critical limiting factor in most cases because structure doesn’t usually allow decoupling, not that it’s not limited. When it IS the limiting factor, I agree with you, but it rarely is. And I think alignment is a different argument.
In EA orgs, alignment can solve the delegation-without-management problem because it can mitigate principal-agent issues. Once we agree on goals, we’re working towards them, and we can do so in parallel and coordinate only when needed. In most orgs, alignment cannot accomplish this, because it’s hard to get people to personally buy into your goals when those goals are profit maximization for a company. (Instead, you use incentive structures like bonuses to align them. But then you need to monitor them, etc.)