Monkeyget

John Van Reenen talks about this in this paper [1]. He has been looking into how and why the giant companies have been concentrating all power in their market : Amazon, Google,...

His hypothesis is that to become a giant company you used to need capital to buy the best factory and the best machines but that nowadays to become big you need to have the best version of intangible capital : proprietary software, users' data,...

Markets become winner takes all and this creates the rise of "superstar companies". To become a giant company you can't just dump money at the problem anymore to build, say, a new factory. The only way to dominate search is to have Google's tech along with users and the data they generate. To become a retail giant you invest heavily in logistics and inventory control management.

This has several consequences :

- You don't need to borrow mass amount of money to become big.

- Changing the interest rate doesn't have as big as an impact as before (if you don't need large amount of capital to grow big, making money more expensive won't prevent companies to grow big).

- wages inequality rise (the few workers that produce the intangible capital in the have high wage while wage become stagnant for the rest)

It is the oldest building in the world. The only older constructions that we know of is a small wall made from piled rock to protect a cave from the weather. Not only is it the oldest but it also is large : 1000 feet across and at least 50 feet deep with several layers covering at least two millennia. The site was only discovered 20 years ago and only about 20% have been excavated so far!

Cultivation first started in the Gobekli area. We know from DNA analysis that the wheat we use today is based on a wild variety of wheat that grew miles away from Gobekli.

It is located in the middle of the fertile crescent: the birthplace of civilization. It is located between the Tigris and Euphrates near their source which is the location of Eden in the bible. It also is located right next to Şanlıurfa which is said to be the birthplace of Abraham.

The size of the monuments also are impressive given that the people who built them were still hunter-harvesters living in small tribes without the knowledge of the wheel or pottery. It required a large workforce working over a large amount of time.

I am happy that the recent discovery seems to confirm my personal theory that Gobekli is a Dakhma [0], a place where bodies were left in the open for vulture to cleanse.

From 'Nobody Ever Gets Credit for Fixing Problems That Never Happened'[0] that was discussed a few days ago [1] :

In one firm we studied, the general manager laid out his goals for improving the product development process [...]. At the same time, they launched many new development projects in anticipation of the expected productivity gains. Viewed through the lens of management’s mental model these decisions were entirely rational. However, that mental model [...] led them to the erroneous belief that the delay between improvement effort and results was short and that their engineers were under-utilized, undisciplined, unmotivated, and unwilling to adhere to the specified process.

The company spent millions and invested countless person-hours to create a new product development process. The new process [...] also increased monitoring, including a structured stage-gate review process and mandated use of project management software. While there were some pockets of success, in most cases the effort had little impact. The leaders of the change effort often attributed its failure to the engineers’ lack of discipline:

“A lot of the engineers felt that [the new process] was no value-add and that they should have spent all their time doing engineering and not filling out project worksheets. It’s brushed off as bureaucratic.”—Manager A

Yet, when we asked engineers why the effort failed, we got a different story:

“People had to do their normal work as well as [use the new project management system]. There just weren’t enough hours in the day, and the work wasn’t going to wait.”—Engineer B

“The new process is a good one. Someday I’d like to work on a project that actually uses it.”—Engineer E

While managers felt the engineers had little interest in following the process, engineers became increasingly frustrated with leaders they felt had no understanding of what was really required to develop new products. Faced with the double bind of hitting aggressive performance targets and equally aggressive improvement targets, they were forced to cut corners while still appearing to follow the process. As one engineer remarked,

As management discovers the engineers’ shortcuts and workarounds, their view that the engineers can’t be trusted is confirmed, and they are forced to step up their monitoring.