DRAFT: Yet Another Jeff Bezosism

This is a DRAFT post, which means it’s not fully formed. I don’t mind publishing DRAFTs, but it’s not a finished product.

When I was a kid, I went to a Montessori school.

Personally I loved it, ended up learning a ton and generally for kids who have a love of learning it’s a great option.

Something I’ve realized over the course of the last couple years is that it doesn’t work for eveyone, and specifically for some kinds of kids.

If you wanted to learn, your potential was unbounded. If you didn’t because you were either uninterested, distruptive, not smart whatever it was awful for you. The more disiplined traditional schooling worked much better, with set curriculum.

In reality a lot of if you learned or not was boudned by your own willingness to learn and it led to much greater variance in outcomes.

I was excited to learn, and because of that was pushed in advanced material much earlier than my counterparts in more regimented schools. Other kids in my class, who weren’t didn’t and even ended up learning a lot less than their counterparts.

This scale applies to other forms of organizing and generalizes quite well.

Smaller companies have higher variance, and require a higher willingness and maximially capable compared to larger orgs.¹ Most of the admistrative overhead for larger orgs is to compensate for people’s lack of willingness to do things.

In the best of large orgs, people being proactive papers over the coordination problems you see when working with larger teams. There’s minimal, throw this over the hedge to team X.

Med/Large organizations, esp in tech, know the benefit of intrinsic motivation. Think of strong engineering efforts that grow from grassroots engineering, gmail, skunkworks, etc.

Many companies pay lip service to letting their employees work on whatever intrests them, but I’ve yet to find that truely be the case. Projects rarely exclusively come from engineering after all, they’re driven by beauracratic and market forces.