Yossi Kreinin has a new blog post out about how the push for greater efficiency in organizations leads to negative outcomes, because it leads to teams

Efficiency and bad outcomes

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2024-07-06 14:30:02

Yossi Kreinin has a new blog post out about how the push for greater efficiency in organizations leads to negative outcomes, because it leads to teams pursuing local efficiency goals rather than doing what’s genuinely best for the business.

A concrete example of this phenomenon in action is Mihail Eric’s first-hand account on how Amazon fell behind in the AI race, despite having a significant head start. There’s a ton of great detail there, I’ll excerpt just one example from the piece:

I remember on one occasion our team did an analysis demonstrating that the annotation scheme for some subset of utterance data was completely wrong, leading to incorrect data labels.

That meant for months our internal annotation team had been mislabeling thousands of data points every single day. When we attempted to get the team to change their annotation taxonomy, we discovered it would require a herculean effort to get even the smallest thing modified.

We had to get the team’s PM onboard, then their manager’s buy-in, then submit a preliminary change request, then get that approved (a multi-month-long process end-to-end).