One of his main conclusions is that the complexity of our firms, built up during a period of growth to seize opportunities in all directions, is likely to be counterproductive now that firms will need to focus, contract, and improve their efficiency. The increasing amount of knowledge sharing and communications across vague structural boundaries, adopted to exploit various potential synergies and growth opportunities, may exacerbate management problems and compromise the quality and cost of firms' output. He points out that SG&A as a percentage of pretax expenses started to accelerate in the mid-1980s, and argues that beyond the increasing importance of knowledge workers "It also reflects a more intense commitment to very complex systems comprising individual parts whose productivity is almost impossible to measure…The risk is that in hard times, the system becomes the problem."

An example of this burgeoning complexity: "Phillip Su, a Windows Vista software engineering manager, reports that the intensity of coordination on this project created 'a phenomenon by which process engenders further process, eventually becoming a self-sustaining buzz.' We have all experienced this unanticipated side effect of apparently cheap communications." Sounds a lot like old C. Northcote Parkinson, doesn't it?

We may see things get simplified in the near term in a big way–pseudo-synergies are out and focus is going to be in (c.f. Citigroup). Maybe.

Fascinating to see that almost forty years on the once-revolutionary central message of The Dice Man, and therefore of the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s, seems to be accepted almost casually as a given.