But you will end up with different divisions trying to solve the same problems in ways that either confound each other or the customer.
Nobody wants to deal with a company that behaves like eight rats in a trenchcoat.
Nobody wants to deal with a company that behaves like eight rats in a trenchcoat.
I'm pretty sure you just described most of the 100 largest consumer products companies, and a good fraction of the Fortune 500.
[0]https://consumergoods.com/top-100-consumer-goods-companies-2...
If you have non factory assembly line[1] personnel above 1000 chances you have that
[1] physical and direct nature of work sometimes countermands weird multiple solutions
That's the tradeoff.
You either allow teams to work independently and lose some efficiency through work duplication. Or, you centralize the work and you lose efficiency through centralized bottlenecks.
For small to medium orgs the centralized approach works better. But as the org grows, the bottlenecks become worse and you're forced to switch to the independent approach which is more scalable.
* The guidance is to allow teams to do work independently in parallel, not give them no direction or strategy of what to work on. Without small discreet teams that can operate without a bunch of external blocking approvals or manual processes, you simply will not get work done as the org scales because your productivity will quadratically approach zero.
* He addresses the cost of coherence (both its creation and its absence) in the post, which is worth reading in full. He also talks about how to structure a product portfolio in order to avoid the “confounding competing solutions” scenario.
In short, you’re not wrong, but the downside you outline is tractable—centralization of decision making is not.
Google might be a good example of this. Each team likely seems productive internally because they come up with new products quickly but customers wonder why the company is producing 4 different chat apps, 3 video services, and nothing seems to work together.