Remember those Yahoos! Whom Marissa had to fire because those adults could not be trusted to do what they were expected to do and be responsible?

Some had “multiple jobs” and both or more employers were getting the short shrift.

Small orgs are like small towns, everyone knows who’s up to what. Large orgs are like cities…

It's a wonder cities don't just fall apart and stop functioning completely without someone taking an attendance headcount everyday and peaking over their shoulders to make sure they are doing their job.

Cities don’t have a particular mission statement, so that kind of comparison isn’t apt.

My point was that in a city people are semi anonymous and others don’t keep tabs in you and know whether you’re a slacker, a thief, the town millionaire, the job producer or not. In a small town folks know to some degree who is vandalizing, doing the graffiti, stealing the cattle, helping farmer John with the fences, bringing food to the widow, etc.

There’s a distributed system of loosely coupled organizations in charge of making cities work. They coordinate by a price system for many urgent voluntary transactions and by bureaucratic organizations with supervision for others. In neither case do they rely on people just doing their jobs because it is the god and honorable thing to do.

What makes you say employees working in cities don't have managers making sure they are doing their jobs?

Yeah, if you don't earn your living you end up homeless and starving.

You can thank capitalism for that.

Was Yahoo! incredibly more productive and efficient after Marissa fired all these slackers ? That doesn't seem to be the story we've seen unfolding from there.

It's a fairness thing at scale. In a small org, when you trust people to behave as adults they will generally fall within some band of normal that everyone sees as "reasonable". In a large org, you get outliers that do things someone else would consider unacceptable, and then they set the tone for the organization ("if they can do it, why can't I?"), and soon it's a race to the bottom in behavior.

The "cities" metaphor is actually pretty apt. In small towns everybody polices each other, and you don't behave badly because your life will become pretty difficult if you do. In a big city, you either have lots of rules in the form of municipal codes, or people start behaving badly along some dimension, eg. crime in SF or zoning in Houston.

I would like to know if you posted that because you have actual experience managing a large team, or you are just taking out of your **.