[ChrisMarshallNY]

> It's terrifying how much critical functionality at an average company exists only in 1-3 brains.

It's not actually terrifying. It's the way that businesses have worked for centuries. There's always a "high priest[ess]" in the woodpile, somewhere, that has "The Keys to the Kingdom."

Most businesses have some form of continuity or recovery plan, but many would collapse, without the Key Player, and they do.

The flip side, is that with the Key Player, they can do very well, indeed.

It's just that Silicon Valley has developed a dread of "The Bus Factor," so we do things like deliberately design shoddy project plans, so that inexperienced, disloyal, transient, teams can run them.

I have looked at codebases that were designed to be implemented by a team, when it should have been a simple, 1-person job. It made the code brittle, overcomplicated, underperformant, and buggy as a rotten log.

[ethbr0]

I guess the thing that surprised and terrified me is that in your modern, hyper-efficient business, these people are everywhere. Because there isn't much you can't do with 1-3 people, if you leverage the right (non-RPA) software to enable them.

So consequently, the Key Player turns out to be sprinkled throughout the org.

And, the really scary part, awareness of "who that person is" generally doesn't seem to penetrate >2 management layers up.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I worked for a 100-year-old Japanese engineering corporation.

They had a seriously robust structure and policy. It worked (check what Japan has been through, in the last 100 years).

But it brings massive overhead and rigidity. Most American companies would not want to work that way.