This morning, Jordan (founder of Parabol) sent me a PowerPoint slide that looked like this:
Alongside the chart was a phrase that I've now learned was apocryphal:
The reason the American Army does so well in war is because war is chaos and the American Army practices chaos on a daily basis.
So: democracy underperforms dictatorship under simple conditions. As complexity increases, democracy gains a relative advantage. (I've written about this here, here and here.)
Of course, very few organizations operate with anything close to democracy; the most common mode is something like a patchwork of dictatorships with decent trade agreements. And most versions of organizational democracy feel Kafka-esque.
This all made me think of The Netflix Culture Deck from 2001 – specifically these three slides:
