The tyranny of the rocket equation applies to organizations, too.

The Tsiolkovsky rocket equation describes how much fuel is required to get a given mass of payload into orbit.

The "tyranny" part is that as you increase the desired payload, you need to start with more fuel, which increases the effective payload, which requires more fuel…

This is a non-linear dynamic leading to quickly escalating costs for even modest payload size increases.

I think the coordination headwind has a similar dynamic for organizations.

When you have a successful organization executing on a market opportunity, the obvious thing to do is add incremental heads to extract more, faster.

And incremental heads do help execute faster… but at a strongly sub-linear growth rate.

That's because as you add more people, there are now more people that need to coordinate to get any plan decided, a cost that grows super-linearly.

As companies grow to mega size, the experience for employees gets increasingly kafka-esque, with everyone running in circles unable to get much done.

Big companies are a terrible way to get big things done in problem domains that have even tiny bits of uncertainty, and yet they are the only plausible way to increase output, so companies grow as big as their market opportunity demands.

This the tyranny of the coordination headwind.

I wonder if this is another thing that AI technologies might affect. If you can give a small number of employees significantly more leverage, you increase output without increasing coordination costs.