Possibly a better alternative than, say, Bridgewater when Ray Dalio was in charge. Adherence to principles was part of a high percentage of decision making conversations, but since is book is so big, they might be best compared to theological arguments in the middle ages, with different specialists arguing with different quotes from different parts of the book.

All in all, once an organization gets big enough, power does what power wants, and power wants what is good for them in the short term, regardless of what is good for the organization. That's how most large companies end up spending very large amounts of money on things that wouldn't actually pass muster to anyone aiming for the organization's best interest and with actual knowledge of what is being accomplished.

You see new, wide eyed PMs approaching budgeting processes as if the goal really was profitability, or customer satisfaction, or something reasonable. But if they are going to stay as PMs for long, they better realize quick that the vast majority of project proposals have only a passing interest in what will be accomplished, and are mainly about making sure every sub-organization gets fed sufficient money to not lose people, or possibly even grow if the manager is well liked. All the efforts in documentation and justification are just theater.

> All in all, once an organization gets big enough, power does what power wants, and power wants what is good for them in the short term, regardless of what is good for the organization.

This has the ring of truth.

Has anyone solved this problem?

Is anyone trying to solve this problem? (Or is everyone in a position to work on the problem just playing the game?)

I loved what Dalio wrote before Principles (like his white paper for All Weather) but Principles seemed to be mad self-aggrandizement done on such a scale to get a "Emperor's Clothes" kind of reaction from people. My sources were telling me about how Dalio was driving David Ferrucci crazy [1] trying to make an AI that could enforce Principles before I read about it in Bloomberg.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ferrucci

The organizational function you describe where departments become self-serving, empire building, and forget that they need to produce something with ROI for the company, felt rampant during the 2010s.

Then the easy money stopped and those companies were forced to look at the ROI of different departments. Entire initiatives or departments were getting cut as soon as budgets stopped growing and executives had to check the reality of what was working for the company and what had become a jobs program.

It’s really frustrating that layoffs are the corrective action. I know a lot of people who were good employees doing arguable good work, but who got hired into departments doing dumb things.

As for junior PMs: I’d be ecstatic if they arrived with a pure profit motive. Lately they arrive full of ideas from Reddit, Twitter, podcasts, and books where they think the only product that matters is building their resume to get the next job. Half of them are min-maxing their effort to resume appeal ratio with every decision. Possibly anecdotally but the junior PMs I’ve had to work with lately are also very obviously doing variations of overemployment where they’re either working on their friends’ startup or just blatantly taking multiple remote jobs and being unavailable half the time. I don’t know why PM roles attract the worst of this, but’s it seems to be the target role for people who want to abuse our remote openings. I should note that great PMs are a massive boost to a team, it’s just getting harder to find them.

> they might be best compared to theological arguments in the middle ages, with different specialists arguing with different quotes from different parts of the book.

> power does what power wants

It would be nice if, in more cases, we could dispense with fictions such as the former and simply acknowledge the latter, in a transparent way, and move on.

> All in all, once an organization gets big enough, power does what power wants,

There is an interesting hypothesis for this in the book "The Evolution of Civilizations" by Carroll Quigley[1]. Basically his idea in the book is that as organizations (or civilizations) get beyond a certain critical mass, people start to lose connection with the collective goals that originally united them and start to coalesce around internal goals related to their smaller unit. So this in a company is when you go from everyone devoting all their efforts to the shared mission and instead working on team goals or (worse) internal politics that may or may not be aligned with the bigger goal.

It's a very interesting book. He's a controversial figure because some of his (other) writings are popular among conspiracy theorists. I haven't read that stuff, but this certainly made sense to me at the time that I read it.

[1] https://ia801601.us.archive.org/4/items/CarrollQuigley-TheEv...