The reason small startups can innovate faster than large enterprises is that they can’t afford to make stupid mistakes. There’s no such evolutionary pressure on enterprises, unless it until the scale of the stupid mistake becomes life threatening for the company.

Makes me wonder if there's a real life story behind that

> small startups [...] can’t afford to make stupid mistakes

Yes, well, I'd say all companies do stupid mistakes?

And the small ones need to be good at noticing when they do it, and revert, undo :- )

> For large organizations, in a way, the whole can be less than the sum of its parts?

They can be, but I don't think it is inevitable.

By way of analogy, large herds of herbivores are arguably much stupider than the individual animals, while insect colonies are considerably more intelligent than their components. Packs of predators (eg. wolves) generally seem to be approximately as smart as an individual, at least so far as hunting is concerned.

Human organizations vary considerably and it isn't hard to come up with examples ranging from 'dumb as a bag of hammers' to 'smart as a whip'. Analogies to various mental illnesses may sometimes apply as well.