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Comment by rajin444 | Hacker News Reader

> feudal power structures are no way to organize 21st century business

The efficiency gains and - more importantly - resiliency gained by having a single leader with a strong vision are enormous and the reason a single ruler is so prominent among humans. Democracy is weak to balkanization and demagoguery.

That being said the real issue here is corrupt elites - which no system can fix. The blast radius from a bad ruler is much worse than bad actors amongst a democratic system, but the potential gains from a single ruler are much higher.

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and Single leadership is weak to overfitting to a broken model. example: Look how china efficiently built empty cities.

Thousands of CEOs each at the helm of a small business is a good model though because though its centralized command and control at the business level, it's also distributed and experimental in aggregate.

I think there's a degree of survivorship bias here. Single-leader feudal power structures are common in business because they're the standard model for businesses here, so you have plenty of examples of them being wildly successful. But there are also lots of examples of failed feudally-structured businesses!

Personally I can think of multiple examples of successful co-ops in one of the two industries I work in (games), in part because there is less of a stigma against less-traditional business structures there. Co-ops have successfully built and released wildly successful projects in a repeatable way. I think we simply don't have enough data to decide at scale whether co-ops are inferior to the way we run corporations in the West.

Any citations for this broad statement?

Perhaps it has been easier historically to converge to the single ruler model due to the available knowledge and resources. Is there any research concluding that one ruler systems offer higher gains in modern societies?

What kind of citation would satisfy you? A survey of organizational structures and success rates? That doesn't sound conclusive.

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