Another presentation by the author (who no longer works at Google, apparently): "Coordination Headwind: How Organizations Are Like Slime Molds" [1].
Historically, yes, as an aspirational goal. Even if, in practice, a lot of people didn't want to or didn't get around to creating a doc to go along with the presentation.
That said, I've seen a real trend over the past decade of a lot of people wanting to consume content/ideas/etc. from a slide format rather than reading paragraphs of text. So it's pretty normal--at least for routine information sharing--to create a text-heavy presentation and just hit the high points when presenting from it. Not sure this is even a bad thing for a lot of purposes--especially to the degree people can put together cogent sets of bullet points but aren't that great at pages of prose.
I prefer long form content... but spending time in the comments section of HN may show a revealed preference.
I concur with your observation. Piling on with a couple examples:
- Axios is a news service that only delivers information in bullet points. Unlike their long-form competitors, they are expanding into local news. [0]
- Long form content, such as books, are less popular. The average number of books read each year has fallen to a 30 year low. [1]
[0] https://www.axios.com/local/columbus/2022/11/22/introducing-...
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/388541/americans-reading-fewer-...
My conference presentations don't generally have a lot of words. But that's not all I do and it does mean my conference presentation slide decks aren't super-informative on their own.
The perennial issue for competent organizations as they scale is the quality of the middle management. Alex didn't write anything about hierarchies of molds (because it most certainly isn't moldy all the way to the top and never was). His pithy slides also don't discuss hiring practices at Google for managers. [We all know how they grill us poor doers.] He also failed to mention our dear friend Peter of the principle fame.
p(goal) = f(p(planners), p(managers), p(doers)) is a more realistic equation. What that f() looks like depends less on organizational structure than on the quality of the workers that mediate planning and building.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34381884#34385570
As the corporate organism itself grows larger and faces newer challenges, it may need to evolve and develop new, more specialized organs that a slime mold does not inherently possess or function well at to scale.
Many organisms in the natural world could not scale exactly as-is to 10x or 100x their normal size with their existing structures.
The idea of a slime mold representing the whole company may have once been true a decade or more ago when Google was much smaller and less extended, but the mental model is much like newer people at Google yearning for the "old Google" that never worked there during its earlier days. It's a nice fantasy.
- Small projects can tolerate collaborating specialist pools (CSPs).
- CSPs attempting large complicated projects are quickly disastrously unlikely to even be completed due to the network effects of uncertainty and disagreement on commitment efforts, even with a hierarchy stuffed-in (assuming each specialist is necessary)
- One solution is to minimize team size.
- Another solution is planning projects better.
I do recommend the excellent "Allocation under Dictatorship: Research in Stalin’s Archives"[1] where the greatest incentive individuals face in an organization have involve doing relatively better compared to other individuals in the organization without significant outside indicators of the right direction.
In that sense, Google is like a government behemoth. Most involved in its direction and functioning have incentives that are decoupled from whether the people who are touched by their "products" and "services" are happy with them.
[1]: https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/164/1/WRAP_Harrison_jel05.pdf