• squaresinger@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Huge corporations also underperform compared to smaller startups.

    If a small startup wants to roll out some new thing they just get to the work. If a corporation does the same thing it first takes a year of preparation and internal politics.

    Remember the old anecdote about how long it takes to order an empty cardboard box at IBM? That one was an extreme example, but the concept persists.

    We had a project, created by two people over half a year. The corporate parent liked it and wanted to expand the product to all the country division. So they planned for a year, then assembled 8 teams with a total of 50 people to copy that project with a planned development time of 3 years. They overran the deadline by 2 years.

    • Maalus@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Cool. Yet you are ignoring the very tiny fact that collective farms started famines. They didn’t “just underperform”.

      • brendansimms@lemmy.world
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        3 hours ago

        iirc…Lysenko (soviet agri-scientist - a shitty one) had convinced the party leaders that his newly bred ‘winter-hardy’ wheat breed was worthy of being planted en masse. It had worked well under ideal lab conditions but failed after several crop yields when planted in the field, and this created famine.