Dan Luu
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The fallacy of corporate intent
🕑 Added 2018-11-01 18:00:06 +0000 UTC One of the most common fallacies I see about companies is the fallacy that the company’s actions are taken for strategic reasons. People often ask my questions like, why is company X building project B, a major endeavor costing billions of dollars? It can’t be for reasons I, II, and III. Maybe they’re playing a deeper game.Nope. That nearly-trillion-dollar company is doing that because of a series of coincidences involving who knows whom and who was in the right place at the right time. It just happens that the founders love big ideas, so the company decided to put resources into “A 2.0” for many values of A. When the org that ran A 1.0 was invited to the meeting, the big shots all blew off the meeting because they thought they were important enough that they didn’t have to go. That meant that the ranking member of the org that showed up was someone who was actually on their way out due to political struggles in the org (they were assigned a project that couldn’t possibly succeed due to a combination of internal and external constraints in how the project was run). Since they were the ranking member of the org at the 2.0 meeting, they were allowed to present their vision for A 2.0, which was compelling enough for them to get 10-ish headcount. That wasn’t nearly enough to build A 2.0, but this is someone who’s a political wizard, so they were able to katamari ball around the company and pick up enough headcount to build a prototype.
A sub-question I’ve been asked about multiple times is, why does this project use a new language? Isn’t that quite a risk? What’s the strategic reason behind choosing such an immature language. The reason, tactical, not strategic, was that the org that runs the language had spare headcount because it’s run by someone who’s buddies with one of the most powerful people at the company. Since the language had, at the time, low marketshare and not a lot of hype, it was a win-win to use the spare headcount to help implement part of A 2.0 in exchange for A 2.0 being implemented in the new language.
After many years of decisions like this, A 2.0 is a reality, and people ask what deep reason the company had for investing billions of dollars in building A 2.0 when they already have two variants of A, both of which are successful. The mistake is to think the company is a single entity that engages in deep reasoning, instead of thinking of the company as a collection of people, each with their own goals and motivations, very few of whom are looking out for the best interests of the company or the best interests of shareholders.
Comments
The imagery of a "katamari ball" has me imagining some manager grabbing staplers and pencils from people's desks, then all the ramen and coffee pots, then everyone's technical books, then the workers themselves (causing them to scream "WHEE!"), then the server racks, then the desks and chairs, and finally a gigantic CEO.
