AI has caused a lot of leaders to overreact. Great leaders find a balance between overreacting and waffling. It's often wise to dampen your response a little bit, without dragging your feet.

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0xpgm 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

From what I've read from people with relevant experience, the only way to get a large organization change direction is to issue imperative decrees lacking nuance, because large organization by nature tend to be process heavy and are too incompetent to follow a nuanced direction.

If you have tens of thousands of employees the more complicated the communication is, the larger the variation of interpretation of its meaning, I suppose

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glaslong 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I have a theory of this based mostly in time working in Meta's RL org on VR and Wearables (disclosure)....

There's a fundamental comms issue, I think, where you can only broadly communicate the least common denominator of what every involved person will understand. The "imperative decrees lacking nuance."

This is doubly hard if the thing is New, so it isn't broadly understood by default in the collective professions of the workforce. For example, we had a HECK of a time getting many web+mobile designers to understand 3D for spatial design like the game designers did. And vise versa, the nuances of building reusable UI and interaction frameworks when maintaining a software platform, for the games folks.

It's virtually impossible (no pun intended) to do something both New and Nuanced with a large group of people. You'll spend all the effort trying to get them to mutually understand a shared, nuanced vision on one hand, and constantly scrambling with their different interpretations producing incompatible parts of work, on the other.

I think you can ONLY really manage it with small groups, and it's a big part of why startups will continue running circles around big orgs, even with shared talent pool.

The only organizational structure that I think mitigates it is having strong top down direction, with vision and expertise at basically every level of the hierarchy. Because it's just taking the small group expert model and delegating it down to expanding levels of detail in execution. Apple seems to be wholly structured around this, and has occasionally done it very well.

	▲	glaslong 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Technically I think there IS another org struct that helps, but it's impractical for a number of Big Corp reasons. A broad studio-like portfolio, where you mostly stay hands-off and willing to burn a ton of money in directions that won't work, and accept that they are out of your control. Stochastically let the best 10% of isolated plays rise on their own while 90% fail. I think the VC model tends to do this relatively well. Large orgs though are inevitably culturally, or even legally -- "shareholders! fiscal responsibility! optimal deployment of capital!" -- INCAPABLE of being that intentionally lossy and hands-off.

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testdelacc1 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

CEOs are so afraid of being Innovators Dilemma’d that they make rash moves before they have any data.

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embedding-shape 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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