[light_triad]

A good example of "founder bias" where big companies are read as not innovating, when in fact their goal is to squeeze as much juice from their user base and strengthen their monopolistic position and pricing power. From the outside it looks like blindness and atrophy but from the inside it's the main bread and butter.

The sighted engineer is also cave adapted, just to a different cave.

[Nevermark]

The problem is when practices are chosen, that improve things on one dimension, and harm things on another, without recognition of the long-term tradeoff being made.

Simply recognizing the tradeoff exists, is likely to result in wiser decisions with lower tradeoff costs, and greater opportunity expansion.

[order-matters]

who is to recognize the tradeoff? communicate it to who? A giant business is built on stability. i dont think its a bad thing that they do not pivot except in circumstances where they have no other choice. The business is a brand and that brand is a certain way of doing things and if/when that way of doing things falls out of favor then the business should fail. the owners made enough to retire by then, as well as many additional people, and its a reasonable way for people to become unemployed which doesnt hurt their chances at new jobs. A new company sprouts up, or 5 new ones, and they can all be lean and quick to pivot and try to figure out the whole new way to do the same kind of business. All the experts can be hired and the supply chain keeps chugging along

this is also a wanring to young people joinging old companies in weak job positions over taking a chance on a new company trying to be better. dont just assume the old company is going to be there forever.

especially now in defense. war has changed. companies like Anduril are on the rise while classics like Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon, etc are assessing how much they can adapt. its not extreme like theyll go out of business but the gov may order way less jets and such than in the past, and put a lot more money into drones. they will still buy jets though, and the classics may need to adapt to a lower funding pool, lower orders, and becoming a low volume legacy product hovering around certain use-cases, while new companies get all the runway to takeoff on the big investments.

this kind of thing plays out at all different scales and to different degrees everywhere in the market.

[Nevermark]

We are talking about the big cultural/organizational decisions that allocate where creative freedom lives or the lack of it.

To not recognize the decisions, weigh their tradeoffs and their implications, is to make the decisions blindly.

Creativity has to be actively protected where it is wanted or impactful. Or in large companies, it will get crushed as power to make choices flows elsewhere.

[worldthruword]

Reminds me of a blogpost about discussions within facebook about supreme importance given to engagement metrics. Then they were replaced with holistic engagement metrics.