In Inside the Box, David Epstein explains how General Magic exemplified the adage that more startups die of indigestion than starvation.
“Overflowing with resources and talent,” he says “they were bereft of helpful constraints.”
Another telling scene [in the General Magic documentary] features a young Darin Adler, who had already led a team that built a Mac operating system before coming to General Magic. Engineers are sitting on the floor in a circle listening to Adler as he tells them that there are “moments where somebody has to start doing something, and what we’ve decided is that for each of those important moments we want to make sure that there’s real responsibility for someone to say, ‘I’m at this important moment, start doing your work.’”
The response, Adler recalled: “They said, ‘Oh, we don’t need a manager. We don’t want you because we don’t need a manager. Our leaders are Andy and Bill. That’s what makes this place great is we don’t have managers.’”
Boundaries can be helpful, because we have a deep-seated compulsion always to add:
In the 1960s, computer scientist Fred Brooks led the development of the IBM computers that NASA used to send humans to the Moon. He later founded the computer science department at the University of North Carolina. But he is most widely remembered for his popular writing on design and project management, including what became known as Brooks’s Law, the idea that adding people to a software project that is already late will make it even more late. We underestimate how adding stuff, including team members, also adds complexity.
[…]
Leidy Klotz, an engineering and architecture professor at the University of Virginia, has shown that humans reflexively add in order to solve problems — more people, more money, more features, etc. — even when subtracting is better. In the simplest demonstration in Klotz’s research, adults were given a Lego structure that needed to be strengthened in order to hold a masonry brick over the head of a Star Wars stormtrooper action figure. Each problem solver could earn money by completing the task, but there was a catch: Every Lego piece they added reduced their reward. And yet, most added multiple pieces even though removing just a single, obviously precarious piece would have solved the problem instantly.
[…]
Long before their work documented it scientifically, product designers had come up with various names for this tendency, like “featuritis” or “the Christmas tree effect.”
[…]
Journalists have the macabre phrase “drown your kittens” to refer to getting rid of lines the writer has fallen in love with but that don’t serve the reader.
I once had a family doctor who commented that doctors knew when to to add new prescriptions but not when to stop old ones.
Excellent example, Bob.
I’m reminded, oddly enough, of how Musk calculated that on a good day he made a hundred command decisions as he walked the floor of his Tesla factory: