Why Few Organizations Adopt Systems Thinking (2006)
Something I&#x27;ve been saying is that the &quot;asshole CEO&quot; is necessary to get large orgs to actually do things. The author tells a relevant example, where a CEO is too timid to force change without the approval of his underlings (wtf?), who <i>in turn</i> are afraid to make changes with the CEO&#x27;s approval. This results in a deadlock where nothing changes.<p>The kind of systems thinking outlined in the article is a <i>very</i> rare thing in the world, and outright frowned upon as &quot;not proper&quot; by those entrenched in the more conservative approaches to leadership.<p>Case in point: Elon Musk.<p>Compare SpaceX to NASA. The development cost of Starship, including about a dozen test articles, is the cost of a <i>single</i> SLS launch. People love to go on about how SpaceX is &quot;making mistakes&quot; and that their &quot;rocket blew up&quot;, while neglecting to mention that the first SLS test launch also failed to achieve the desired orbit.<p>Elon Musk is one of the few corporate CEOs that get that mistakes are necessary stepping stones on the way to success. He encourages experimentation and rapid iteration, and will fire idiots that push back against improvement. Remember the engineer that argued with him about Twitter&#x27;s slow performance, where it takes <i>tens of seconds</i> for it to show less than 1 KB of text? That guy had no incentive to make changes and was happy to let things be.<p>Meanwhile, I&#x27;ve been to over 150 organisations as a consultant, and not one of them has this mindset at <i>any</i> level of management. Everything has to be perfect up front. Everything needs to be planned 6 months in advance. Nobody is ever allowed to flip a harmless switch &quot;just to test&quot; an idea, no-no-no! That&#x27;s <i>not proper</i>. The switch flipping has to be documented. It has to have a test plan, a rollback plan, a UAT plan, and seventeen people need to have a hundred meetings over months instead of <i>simply trying the thing to see if it works</i>.<p>This is the inherent nature of self-organised bureaucracies. Everyone optimises for their own personal local optimum, which is <i>never</i> the organisation&#x27;s optimum.<p>Only the CEO can force behaviour changes to redirect efforts towards the global optimum, but that requires forcing people out of their local optimum, which is <i>unpleasant</i> for those people.<p>That&#x27;s why you need &quot;asshole CEOs&quot; like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or Elon Musk. These people can never rise to top organically, via ass kissing and &quot;making nice&quot;. They have to be there from the beginning, holding the reins of power in a way that cannot be taken from them by people that are made uncomfortable.