> Large corporations are just groups of people with conflicting incentives [...] The only thing we can reliably bet on is: all organizations tend towards dysfunctional bureaucracies

All societies are dysfunctional, great and small, because human beings are dysfunctional. But ultimately, the basis for any society - family, community, company, nation, human race, etc - is a common good.

So it makes sense to ask: what is the common good of a given large corporation? Why are we all here, together? I suspect many people don't have a good answer. Having the answer, however, gives you a certain agency and intellectual freedom.

> All societies are dysfunctional, great and small, because human beings are dysfunctional.

I don't agree with the 'because' part of this. It misses my point about why organizations are dysfunctional. Even if the organization was made up of perfectly rational, perfectly functional individuals, it would still be dysfunctional. The people running large corporations, are individually, very rational, and very functional. They are among the most capable humans at achieving their goals. Any explanation of organizational dysfunction has to also explain that data.

The dysfunction (which means actions not aligned with the shareholders) comes from the fact that 1. preferences cannot always be aggregated coherently and 2. that the people operating the corporation do not necessarily have incentives aligned with the shareholders. The first is a mathematical impossibility which cannot be fixed, and the second is a failure of mechanism design. That's the "open problem" I mentioned.