Comment by ayewo
5 years ago
There was a fantastic discussion some years ago on ways to design an organization to minimize the tendency to drift towards self-preservation instead of remaining customer-focused.
The HN discussion[1] was started by an article that provided numbers that seemed to suggest that Wikipedia's spending was slowly spiraling out of control.
That really is a fantastic quote and a fantastic thread!
What really stuck out is that Buffet said its the most important thing about Business and he didn't learn it in Business school. Same! I did an MBA and it was the biggest elephant in the room.
But he didn't specify how he arranged things to avoid the problem.
Fair point. The next poster explains how Amazon identifies and tries to mitigate it:
"if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right"
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