Great article. I've come to believe that Ben Horowitz is the best management writer today. He comes from a technical place, and has learned the ways of management via the school of hard knocks. And every interesting project worth doing comes from the school of hard knocks.
I've seen this problem in organizations many times. When you do bottom-up organization design, the most persuasive people win. Then people start justifying promotions and pay based on the size of their teams. And those who were more disciplined in the process lose, because they could have done more with more people, just optimally.
The other perverse side effect of this is some people who are great with 4-5 people teams (good player-coaches) are disasters as the head of 30 person organizations. Their style doesn't scale, but they feel the need to grow because of the poor incentives.
This type of issue comes up in consulting quite a bit, where "Fees managed" can be the key metric rather than "Customer ROI" or "Customer Satisfaction."
I've seen this problem in organizations many times. When you do bottom-up organization design, the most persuasive people win. Then people start justifying promotions and pay based on the size of their teams. And those who were more disciplined in the process lose, because they could have done more with more people, just optimally.
The other perverse side effect of this is some people who are great with 4-5 people teams (good player-coaches) are disasters as the head of 30 person organizations. Their style doesn't scale, but they feel the need to grow because of the poor incentives.
This type of issue comes up in consulting quite a bit, where "Fees managed" can be the key metric rather than "Customer ROI" or "Customer Satisfaction."