The bulk of the world has long understood that large organizations = bureaucracy = inefficiency. Social historians Strauss and Howe have amassed evidence demonstrating how this occurs cyclically in national systems . But, still, it's been awfully difficult to quantify how and why this entropy consistently builds up over time... until now. New research by Alessandro Pluchino and team at the University of Catania (talk about a flattening world), reported in Technology Review , confirms the conventional wisdom that incompetence can spread through a business as " individuals [are] promoted until they reach their level of maximum incompetence." In other words, social climbers that can best navigate a system that fails to understand the diversity of human competency in different areas gradually, but steadily contribute to inefficiency in large organizations that can no longer rely on direct performance oversight. Pluchino's research is based on a simulated agent-based mo
on the social consequences of emerging tech