Interesting article, and it points out real problems that large organizations face. It made me think of the issues I've seen dealing with government contracts in the US. Policies can create perverse incentives and have unintended consequences regardless of their intention, and when dealing with large organizations those sorts of things have to be considered as they end up steering the ship.

Near the end of the article the author mentions that 5 people can look each other in the eye and trust each other, while 11,000 can't. This suggested a question to me: Where does that stop? How many people do you have to have before a 'local culture' isn't enough and trust breaks down? I've read things in the past about Dunbar's Number which suggests this number is around 110. That seems to be about the number of people that individuals can 'keep in mind'. I have often wondered whether organizations might benefit from taking that limit into mind and structuring things so that no level or group would be permitted to grow beyond that. To grow larger, build a hierarchy where groups of about 100 choose a representative whose task is to know the concerns of everyone in the group and represent those concerns when discussing with reps from other groups, etc.