This work was less “fun’ but perhaps more instructive. On one level, it made me wonder whether any scaled institution is governable. If you have hundreds of thousands of employees, whether you’re a huge bank or the California State Government (where I was inaugural Chief Data Officer), I’m not sure there is any system you can set up to make it work. I’ve become sympathetic to Brandeis’s notion of a Curse of Bigness. To be less abstract, though, there is no fixing institutions that have gotten so big. They can build a new business unit that does something innovative (well, if they hired me), but reforming their core business is impossible. Just too many people, too many processes, too much regulatory overhang. But if you start from scratch…
Link:: https://blog.zactownsend.com/know-your-enemy-how-three-years-at-mckinsey-shaped-my-second-startup