Customers want consistency. That’s why management turns people into a reliable system where anyone can quit without affecting the outcome of the system. Just like engineers think about software as a system, business people think about companies as a system. McDonalds is the prime example of this. If you enter one of the stores, it doesn’t matter whether John or Dave is in that day. The burger will be the same.

Some problems are innovation and misaligned incentives. A highly optimized system is efficient but inflexible, and sometimes optimized towards the wrong targets.