No, he is saying operating by consensus doesn't scale.

"Scale" is a funny word. It doesn't scale in terms of decision making speed. But it does scale in terms of decision making quality. Obviously if social cohesion within the group is too high, or if the people present cross too many hierarchical levels, the group won't use its diversity to make excellent decisions. But if done properly, including more people in decision making results in good decisions.

This is one of the ways that you can get over narrow-minded specialists making decisions that work for them but screw everybody else.

Google has had both success and failure. The successes have paid for the failures and then some, but the failures did happen.