Y no modularity?
Still thinking about modularity....

In a healthy arrangement, modularity is often generated by rebellious offspring.

A hive or pack or tribe that is badly managed will push out rebels who then try to start their own hive or pack or tribe. When the rebels succeed, the badly managed original has serious competition and must either improve its management or die.

Later the same thing happened in the corporate world. Billy Durant's bad management of GM spawned rebellious managers who departed and founded Chrysler and Nash. Henry Ford's stiff management caused the Dodge Brothers to leave and start their own company. In electronics, Fairchild's bad management spawned the rest of Silicon Valley.

= = = = =

This basic spawning process seems to have stopped.

Elon is a lot like Billy Durant. He's been managing badly for 15 years, losing money every year, focusing on his own distractions instead of production. Nobody has departed and started a competitor to SpaceX or Tesla.

Amazon is killing its workers and killing the entire economy, but nobody has departed and started a competitor.

Why? Best guess is the Share Value lunacy. Billy was all about Share Value, which is exactly why he was kicked out of GM, then recaptured it by manipulating Share Value, then got kicked out again. In that era the corporate boards were focused on PROFIT, an alarm that instantly flashes red when management favors manipulation over production. Now the boards and regulators are focused solely on Share Value, which means that bad management is the SOLE PURPOSE OF CORPORATIONS. Nobody has a problem with bad management, so nobody leaves.

= = = = =

Later thought: Small and privately-held companies still operate the old way, with profit as a goal. They still focus on products and customers, which means they still fail if badly managed. It's an odd disconnect between two parts of the same supposedly "capitalist" system, and raises the same question on a larger scale. Why is there no competition between the two competing versions of "capitalism"? Why don't we hear executives on the old-fashioned side bashing the new version and advertising the virtues of non-stock ownership? This comparison was fairly common in earlier eras when the distinction wasn't nearly as sharp.

= = = = =

Weird update next day: Well, I got exactly what I was wishing for, but it came from an utterly insane source. Elon, in the middle of his bizarre and technically illegal tweetfest about LBOing his company, said: "This is especially true for a company like Tesla that has a long-term, forward-looking mission. SpaceX is a perfect example: it is far more operationally efficient, and that is largely due to the fact that it is privately held." Nuff said, or something.

Labels: defensible times, metametrology

  ¶ 2:33 AM