a day ago
- Bureaucracies inevitably form in organizations over time due to factors like Dunbar's number (150-person threshold), where informal communication breaks down, leading to formal processes like change proposals.
- Upside-downside asymmetry: employees avoid risky opportunities because perceived status loss from failure outweighs potential gain, encouraging decision-making paralysis and bureaucratic safe processes.
- Inclusivity impulses, blame-assignment hesitance, and team-oriented ownership create bureaucracy by avoiding individual accountability and diffusing responsibility through group processes.
- Promotion legibility: as organizations grow beyond ~150 people, informal ranking becomes inconsistent, leading to formal checklists that attract 'bureauphiles' and distort incentives toward box-ticking.
- Selection effects: bureaucratic cultures attract people who thrive in them, perpetuating more bureaucracy.
- Methods to slow bureaucratic decline include minimizing headcount (e.g., WhatsApp with 55 employees), aggressive firing (especially middle managers), assigning single directly responsible individuals, and using vibes-oriented promotion processes based on executive intuition rather than checklists.
- Elon Musk's management at Tesla and SpaceX exemplifies anti-bureaucratic tactics: flat communication, direct problem-solving, and threats to fire those who create silos.