Jonathan Grant

Nice little abject lesson in how corporate culture effectively dilutes vision.

I would assert that the issue is not decentralization in hierarchies (as implied in the article), but rather an inward focus on the enterprise, rather than the customer. The average person is motivated to create & maintain an environment at work that is comfortable, predictable, and secure. This leads to the kinds of internal administrative turf-wars that churn out turds like the website described in the article.

The immature reaction (and the one recommended by the author) is to view dictatorial control centralized in one individual as the only solution. While every great product needs a strong vision holder, most great things are built by teams of people who cooperate (and sometime fight) with one another. Your core team is what gets your vision built.

The idea that you can individually design something pretty then turn to the production hordes and say “make it work”, is infantile and self-defeating.