I think our industry has a huge "boulder" - we often work on useless software that is far too removed from real world applications, which causes us to lose our passion.

When you have 50 engineers maintaining a boring piece of crap software which can be maintained by 5 engineers, you will start noticing the productivity going down. Engineers who used to be very productive will slow down to meet the low expectations.

Brainstorming a way to avoid this problem:

- working on things we're passionate about with real-world impact

- having a bunch of small organizations with small number of employees (maybe Mark should break down facebook into 50 smaller companies)

- stop creating redundant jobs; if things are not going well, adding 100 people to a project isn't going to fix the delayed project

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXQ2lO3ieBA

"If thats the Bradley, then what's this? [...] How did they get to that from this?"

General: "This all well and good Col. Smith. But with this gorilla in production I don't supposed there's going to be anything left in the budget for my scouts. . . . This is a speedy vehicle, why can't it be both? . . . We'll just stick a turret on top with lots of opticals. . . . We aught to get the biggest bang we can up there [in the turret]."

Other general: "Add on some firepower!"

Please do go through the deck. At about 152 the author talks about a way through organizational headwinds. Also, the thesis is that an organization's ability to mutate and respond in a balance between collective and cellular methods is similar to a slime mold in a positive way (slide 149).