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Monday, June 6, 2011

Why Cities Keep Growing, Corporations And People Always Die, And Life Gets Faster | Geoffrey West interview

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This is in complete contrast to companies. The Google boys in the back garage so to speak with ideas of the search engine, were no doubt promoting all kinds of crazy ideas and maybe having even crazy people around them.

Well, Google is a bit of an exception, because it still tolerates some of that. But most companies start out probably with some of that buzz. But the data indicates that at about 50 employees to a hundred that buzz starts to stop. A company that was more multi dimensional, more evolved, becomes uni dimensional. It closes down.

Indeed, if you go to General Motors or you go to American Airlines or you go to Goldman Sachs, you don't see crazy people. Crazy people are fired. Well, to speak of crazy people, is taking the extreme. But maverick people are often fired.

It's not surprising to learn that when manufacturing companies are on a down turn, they decrease research and development, and in fact in some cases, do actually get rid of it, thinking this is "oh, we can get that back in two years we'll be back on track."

Well, this kind of thinking kills them. This is part of the killing, and this is part of the change from superlinear to sublinear, namely companies allow themselves to be dominated by bureaucracy and administration over creativity and innovation, and unfortunately, it's necessary. You cannot run a company without administrative. Someone has got to take care of the taxes and the bills and the cleaning the floors and the maintenance of the building and all the rest of that stuff. You need it. And the question is, “can you do it without it dominating the company?” The data suggests that you can't.

The question is, as a scientist, can we take these ideas and do what we did in biology, at least based on... [+]

read the full post & watch the video here:

http://edge.org/conversation/geoffrey-west

Posted via email from Siobhan O'Flynn's 1001 Tales

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