Re:Napoleon as Organizational Designer (2009) [pdf]
by a_d on Wednesday July 11, 2018 @05:14AM
(#17505517)
Adding more “micro army” pods would exponentially increase the coordination costs / communication overhead. If communication is the main challenge then decentralizing power would lead to more org ineffectiveness (centralized/command-control structures would be better).
Anyway, as I commented earlier: I think the authors miss the central innovation that enabled org innovation — which is all the tech Napoleon developed around messaging!
Re:Napoleon as Organizational Designer (2009) [pdf]
by azernik on Wednesday July 11, 2018 @05:37AM
(#17505596)
He also, however, managed to reduce the coordination costs by that eternal go-to - finding subordinates he could trust, who would grok his plans well enough to DTRT even without a lot of communication. The Napoleonic armies had an enormous number of talented generals aside from the Great Man himself.
The central organisational challenge was: how to march 250,000 men on foot across a continent with no motor transport for supplies nor radio communications? It was more effective to spread out, but this required delegating authority down the hierarchy. Effectively the Grand Armee was a set of smaller micro-armies that allowed it to overcome the scaling challenge.