Interesting how this mirrors the debate in many corporations between functional organization (eng/sales/UX/marketing/accounting/HR) vs. product organization (Search/Ads/Chrome/Android/GMail/etc.) The military is organized functionally. Recently, basically every major company other than Apple has found that product organization yields better results, because each individual product can better respond to competitive threats in their market.

Makes me wonder if the U.S. military is the next big institution to be "disrupted" by thousands of tiny startups, we just don't realize it because fortunately, everyone would rather have peace.

Regina Dugan ran DARPA like a startup - or at least like an innovation incubator:

https://www.fastcompany.com/1784731/regina-dugans-innovative...

JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) is a cross-functional mission-driven organization:

https://dupress.deloitte.com/dup-us-en/deloitte-review/issue...

> Recently, basically every major company other than Apple has found that product organization yields better results, because each individual product can better respond to competitive threats in their market.

Do you have a source for that? Not because I'm challenging you, but because I'd like to read more on it.

Initially inspired by this Stratechery post (which also has a bunch of historical references):

https://stratechery.com/2016/apples-organizational-crossroad...

Also by personal experience at Google, which reorganized from functional lines to product lines when Larry took over as CEO in 2011.

There've also been a bunch of other articles about this. Selected reading material:

https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/functional-versus-unit...

http://thetechnalyzer.com/apples-functional-organization/

https://hbr.org/1968/11/organizational-choice-product-vs-fun...

https://a16z.com/2010/08/02/taking-the-mystery-out-of-scalin...

I'm perhaps overselling product organization as having "won" - the choice remains controversial, and the a16z article even explicitly says that it's basically a "pick your poison" situation where whichever choice you make will have drawbacks. But the general principle remains that product organization leads to more nimble products, while functional organization leads to more efficient functions. Perhaps the military's functional organization is a function (no pun intended) of it being peacetime, and the primary goal of Congress being to control costs.