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by qprofyeh
1265 days ago
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So I assume if they hired someone cheap who’s only job is to manage OPs account payments, and they did this for perhaps 100 other accounts (manager per account), they’d still make millions profit extra, yearly? I indeed struggle to understand why anyone is leaving that on the table. |
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Each body in the machine needs a reporting structure, training, tooling, a career path, and be plugged into other structures that have visibility to and alignment with, senior management. So it's about trying to maximize the size of your company while keeping the complexity manageable. In a big organization, management is struggling for simplicity and visibility, and one technique is standardization of processes and alignment on goals and processes so that you have more than just a big bureaucracy doing thousands of inscrutable things, but you have a bureaucracy that management can understand, measure, and steer as best they can. This is the biggest challenge.
So they tend not to do things like hire one off people to do random things at odds with what everyone else is doing.
That means you do not chase every possible thing which appears to have some upside but adds complexity. Because following the latter approach is the administrative equivalent of "yes, we are an autobody shop, but people often come here hungry, so let's also sell them some pancakes" -- a decade of these type of decisions and you have a huge unmanageable mess.
Clay Shirky once wrote a piece in which ATT reached out to him for a business discussion about getting into web hosting, and when he told them how little he paid for web hosting, they were absolutely stumped at how anyone could provide reliable webhosting for a profit, and Shirky replied that his webhosting just wasn't very reliable. He tells them there is no staging environment provided, no failure, no offsite backup, no redundant power -- how sometimes he'd just take the main site offline when he wanted to update, and other times it would go down when there was too much traffic. The ATT folks just stared at him in disbelief. And Shirky knew that they weren't going to get into the web hosting business because a company can't both be good at doing one thing and the opposite of that thing at the same time. A company that has reliability in its corporate DNA isn't going to "hire a few guys" to create a cheap, yet unreliable offering - even if it means they are leaving money on the table.