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I remember when Paul Graham pointed out that, « internally, most companies are run like communist states » (in http://paulgraham.com/opensource.html )

The picture he paints here of postwar-America as a bland, uniform country dominated by a few mega-institutions reminds me of the USSR.

How ironic.

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I knew a fellow who used to do some trade with the Soviet Union back in the day, and he made the opposite point: In the US, your government is democratic but at work it's a totalitarian hierarchy. In the USSR, the government was totalitarian, but at work everyone got to vote on major issues. (This would have been in post-Khrushchev times.)

There was a kind of interesting boomlet in the 1930s-40s when U.S. and Soviet management literature had a lot of interests in common, and pretty openly borrowed ideas from each other. Some aspects of the Soviets' rapid industrialization were seen by American management theorists as very modern, basically taking to the next level the "scientific management" idea that the U.S. industrial trusts had pioneered. The Soviets were in turn also very interested in American management literature, especially the more rationalized/scientific approaches aiming to quantify and optimize factors of productivity. They would've loved the current trend towards pervasive metrics!

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