- Joined
- Jul 10, 2008
- Messages
- 67,464
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- 113
Brivael Le Pogam
@brivael
·
18h
Translated from French
Most large companies are zombie organizations. Here's why.
In League of Legends, your rank isn't a title. It's a continuous measure. You're Master because you're playing like a Master this week. If you stop grinding, you drop down. Diamond. Platinum. Gold. The system doesn't owe you anything: your rank reflects your skill at this exact moment, not what it was three years ago.
Now look at a classic S&P 500 company. A guy becomes VP because he was excellent at 35. At 50, he's still VP. In the meantime, he might have stopped producing, stopped learning, stopped challenging his mental models. Doesn't matter: the title is locked in. The pyramid hierarchy works like a ratchet—you climb up, you don't climb back down. Your organizational Elo is frozen at the peak of your career.
It's a Darwinian aberration. These structures distribute authority based on past competence, and past competence is a very poor predictor of present competence—especially in a world that's changing fast.
Competitive games solved this problem twenty years ago. Elo recalculates with every match. The hierarchy reflects real performance, not the memory of a performance. It's brutal, and that's exactly why it works: the best players really are the best players, not the ones who were good back in 2008.
AI makes this aberration lethal. When a team of 12 people with the right tools can produce what a 200-person department used to, the cost of a VP who no longer produces isn't just his salary—it's the gap between what he's blocking and what a meritocratic organization would unlock. That gap explodes every month.
Look at the market. The S&P 500 barely exists anymore. There's the S&P 7 (Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, Meta, Tesla) that's capturing nearly all the value creation, and 493 zombies holding their cap through accounting inertia. The zombies share one trait: competence doesn't flow there. It crystallizes into titles, territories, protective processes.
The companies that will emerge over the next ten years will have a new structural property: authority will be continuously revocable. Present competence will be the only currency. No more title rents. No more committees. No more "I earned my position in 2015." You produce now, or you drop off the ladder.
It's not an ideological question. It's just that in an environment where AI divides execution costs by 50, organizations that protect acquired incompetence get obliterated by those that don't.
Everything needs reinventing. And that's exactly what makes the moment fascinating.
@brivael
·
18h
Translated from French
Most large companies are zombie organizations. Here's why.
In League of Legends, your rank isn't a title. It's a continuous measure. You're Master because you're playing like a Master this week. If you stop grinding, you drop down. Diamond. Platinum. Gold. The system doesn't owe you anything: your rank reflects your skill at this exact moment, not what it was three years ago.
Now look at a classic S&P 500 company. A guy becomes VP because he was excellent at 35. At 50, he's still VP. In the meantime, he might have stopped producing, stopped learning, stopped challenging his mental models. Doesn't matter: the title is locked in. The pyramid hierarchy works like a ratchet—you climb up, you don't climb back down. Your organizational Elo is frozen at the peak of your career.
It's a Darwinian aberration. These structures distribute authority based on past competence, and past competence is a very poor predictor of present competence—especially in a world that's changing fast.
Competitive games solved this problem twenty years ago. Elo recalculates with every match. The hierarchy reflects real performance, not the memory of a performance. It's brutal, and that's exactly why it works: the best players really are the best players, not the ones who were good back in 2008.
AI makes this aberration lethal. When a team of 12 people with the right tools can produce what a 200-person department used to, the cost of a VP who no longer produces isn't just his salary—it's the gap between what he's blocking and what a meritocratic organization would unlock. That gap explodes every month.
Look at the market. The S&P 500 barely exists anymore. There's the S&P 7 (Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, Meta, Tesla) that's capturing nearly all the value creation, and 493 zombies holding their cap through accounting inertia. The zombies share one trait: competence doesn't flow there. It crystallizes into titles, territories, protective processes.
The companies that will emerge over the next ten years will have a new structural property: authority will be continuously revocable. Present competence will be the only currency. No more title rents. No more committees. No more "I earned my position in 2015." You produce now, or you drop off the ladder.
It's not an ideological question. It's just that in an environment where AI divides execution costs by 50, organizations that protect acquired incompetence get obliterated by those that don't.
Everything needs reinventing. And that's exactly what makes the moment fascinating.
