Comment by znnajdla
1 day ago
And this is also why all institutions rot over time. When the original experts and founders are gone, only the codified superficial knowledge remains. The result is bureaucracy coasting on the resources and reputation built by the original founders. Works until it encounters real problems that are not solved by superficial rules.
Right.. Countless times I see people struggle with something then complain about the fact that nobody wrote anything down ahead to hand hold them through the problem. As if the old experts would've known to write that. And often times they did write stuff, but it either wasn't read or it ran into this issue of instruction being incapable of transmitting everything you actually need.
There's another perspective on this, which is that the entire function of mature corporations is to codify what's needed to perform certain functions mechanistically, eliminating the need for expertise. Sure, you might have product development or R&D but they're not part of the daily customer-facing function of the corporation.
That's why when private equity buys a company, the first thing they often do is shut down any new product development or R&D. They want to run the machine and extract profit from what it does now - a cash cow - without taking risks on changing a working model. In this model, new product development is for startup ventures, not mature companies whose DNA doesn't tend to be a good fit for it anyway.
tl;dr: What you're describing is the system working as designed and intended. For better or worse.