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Comment by PeterStuer | Hacker News Reader

Using the artcles nomenclature, in my experience (only primarily knowledge worker businesses) ever company grows from 'cowboys' into layers of 'drone management' where actual production is still relying on 'cowboys' to get the actual work done and keep the company running despite the 'processes'.

This by the way is why most big ERP, BPM,RPA projects fail. Once the pretence is codified it turns out the emperor never had any clothes.

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I think a little more detail is that for a company to succeed to grow, the cowboys needs to _want to phase themselves out_ and figure out how processes should be from the in-house learned pains.

More often however, cowboy entrepreneurs are either pushed to by boards or otherwise takes in "experienced" people from large organizations that honestly often became "seniors" by cargo-culting knowledge about how "big business" should be run.

Writing this, i realized that this is a tangent on that Founder Mode essay by Paul Graham.

https://www.paulgraham.com/foundermode.html

well said. Can relate. So how can this be prevented? I mean Processes pretending its a system while it' actually a loosely coupled cowboy network?

You can't put a research or development into a process. And "software development" has that name for a reason.

You can put the interfaces of those activities into a process, so you insulate the rest of the company from their randomness. But you can't formalize the activities themselves.

Is that a reference to something (emporer..clothes)?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Clothes

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