I am still not sure what the author means by 'big company.' I have worked at Fortune 100 companies and the intelligence of the IT staff is nothing to brag about from a technical standpoint. In fact most 'big companies' are political quicksand for high throughput individuals.
That said, economies of scale are a wonder to behold. When you think of how little each person outputs per day yet how much money the corporation still makes and how much each executive still skims. It makes me think there must be brilliance somewhere in the organization chart to make it all work.
This has always struck me as well: given so much inefficiency, waste and corruption, how do they still survive? On a macro level, given human irrationality, such as our well-documented cognitive biases, how does the world continue to 'work'?
Yeah, I've wondered this too. How do so many incompetent people create so much value? Yet, with the recent economic trouble, it's a bit less mysterious. They don't.
That said, economies of scale are a wonder to behold. When you think of how little each person outputs per day yet how much money the corporation still makes and how much each executive still skims. It makes me think there must be brilliance somewhere in the organization chart to make it all work.