> If something hasn't been tried at a wide-scale I wouldn't say you can conclude that.
I dunno; there are things that require herd adoption to succeed, but something like this doesn't need scale to show improvement.
> A company that executes too slowly might not be successful. So I can imagine that small companies work better as dictatorships. They need fast decisions, they need a vision.
> But big corporations? They move slowly anyway. They have a lot of subdivisions. One part doesn't know what another is doing.
Big corporations move slowly through decision-making because they are sampling many inputs. Yeah, things fall between the cracks because that is the nature of a large body of people, but in big companies especially, every company-wide decision is made after sampling input from almost every department (HR, Legal, Accounting, Marketing, Operations, etc).
No big company CEO decides on something like changing suppliers, changing supplied products, changing production (and produced products) without having the information from dozens of other executives, who, in their turn, are sampling information from HoD, senior management, and more.
All the executives, before board meetings, need to have their deck up to date. They never appear before the board (or the CEO) without data.
It almost looks, to me, like a federated democracy or a republic already.
Just as US citizens don't provide direct input to who the president is, they provide a representative who represents them, in big companies managers represent the people under them. The people under a manager can't vote for line-managers, but in every case that I've seen where a manager was unpopular with their subordinates, they were replaced.
> It could be that a bit more error-correction through democratic participation helps
I dunno what "errors" this error-correction would take when performed by foot-soldiers. As important as janitors are, should they have a say in determining what next years product line should look like?