>Inflexibility to changing market conditions. Having invested time, money and effort into forming such an intricate long-term plan drives us to stupidly believing sunk cost fallacies, and ignore evidence of ineffectiveness.
Oh please. I've worked in giant companies that planned things years in advance. The plans changed frequently, with market conditions. Planning things far ahead doesn't mean you're rigidly bound to those plans, it just means you have goals you've set and you're going to work towards unless things change, forcing you to alter those plans.
By your logic, you shouldn't bother going to college, because things might change and planning things out 4-5 years in advance like that is futile. Lots of people go to college and end up changing their major or doing things somewhat differently while they're there; not going to college at all because this might happen would be stupid.
>Top-level decision makers are poorly informed about what's possible and what's actually effective. Complete top-down decision making is Dilbert incarnate.
Centralized planning doesn't necessarily mean micromanagement. It just means not acting like Microsoft with the different business units all competing with each other and stabbing each other in the back.
> Planning things far ahead doesn't mean you're rigidly bound to those plans, it just means you have goals you've set and you're going to work towards unless things change, forcing you to alter those plans.
Except that's not what the original poster was talking about. The OP specifically referenced the centralized planning of communist states, which are poorly informed and inflexible to changing conditions, just like I said, and they employ deceptive propaganda even among the people that are supposed to help them realize their plans.
Nothing wrong with having a rough strategy that you openly share with your employees so you can all work towards realizing. That's exactly the kind of planning I described in fact.
Then the OP was making a strawman argument. I've worked in big companies, and I've seen long-term planning, and it's not like what he complains about. He's alleging that all big companies use this mythical rigid central planning, and it simply isn't true, he doesn't even have any examples.
If big companies were all like failed communist states, then these big companies would have failed long ago. They haven't. Maybe some have, and maybe some small fraction of those did fail partially due to overly-rigid long-term planning, but to claim that this is a common problem among big companies is quite wrong IMO.
Oh please. I've worked in giant companies that planned things years in advance. The plans changed frequently, with market conditions. Planning things far ahead doesn't mean you're rigidly bound to those plans, it just means you have goals you've set and you're going to work towards unless things change, forcing you to alter those plans.
By your logic, you shouldn't bother going to college, because things might change and planning things out 4-5 years in advance like that is futile. Lots of people go to college and end up changing their major or doing things somewhat differently while they're there; not going to college at all because this might happen would be stupid.
>Top-level decision makers are poorly informed about what's possible and what's actually effective. Complete top-down decision making is Dilbert incarnate.
Centralized planning doesn't necessarily mean micromanagement. It just means not acting like Microsoft with the different business units all competing with each other and stabbing each other in the back.