Why do corporations tend to reduce themselves to the lowest common denominator? 🧵
The book "Loonshots" refers to the idea of "return on politics": Companies should try to make sure that it's more advantageous for one's career to make actual contributions than to be engaged in internal marketing of one's work and angling to get promoted and/or amass more power.
Likewise, @BretWeinstein and @HeatherEHeying refer to the problem of administrators in universities: those who are willing to bear "networking", woriking in committees, and implementing policies, are those who get to control the future, overriding those who focus on their work.
And of course education exemplifies just one of many sectors with heavy government involvement, such as healthcare, (and quite likely defense) that have similar issues. aei.org/carpe-diem/cha… 
However Big Tech (and really, anything where prepending "Big" feels appropriate - Big Auto, Big Oil, Big Pharma, etc), is not immune to these effects. Whenever immediate feedback is removed, and replaced for the mediated, watered down, beautified, self-serving, and all-around...
...compromised feedback that goes up/down the managerial chain of command, you end up with corporations that do the exact opposite of what's ultimately in their own interest. This is why startups have a built-in advantage: They've not yet been abstracted away from the real world.
The operative word, of course, is "yet". So long as the problem composing people for a common goal, without having their interactions ultimately revert to the lowest common denominator is unsolved, we'll be trapped in this cycle of samsara that looks more like a downward spiral.
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