A flaw we already understand in people In 1999, the psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning published a finding that has quietly shaped how we think about competence ever since. People who perform poorly on tests of logic, grammar, and reasoning do not simply perform poorly. They also overestimate how well they have done, and they do so systematically. The cruelty of the result lies in its mechanism. The same lack of skill that produces the weak performance also removes

Image source: Google Images The story no one wrote down for them Every company runs on a story. That story is what lets a junior analyst in São Paulo and a senior partner in Singapore act in the same firm's name, on the same day, and still cohere. It rarely lives in the handbook. It lives in the side comments at the all hands, the corrections in the hallway, the things that get praised and the things that get quietly walked back. Human employees absorb it slowly, almost witho

Image source: Matrix Movie In 1999, The Matrix gave a generation a vocabulary for a particular kind of unease. Neo lives inside a world that looks ordinary and behaves ordinarily, until he starts to notice the small inconsistencies. The deja vu cat. The glitch in the corner of the eye. The dream that feels truer than the meeting. By the end of the first act, he learns that the world he has been operating inside is authored, convincing, and editable, and that almost no one aro

Structural contingency theory has always carried an appealing promise. If the environment becomes uncertain, the organization loosens; if the technology becomes complex, the hierarchy relaxes; if information becomes harder to process, the design becomes more organic. The world changes, structure adapts, and effectiveness follows when the two are in alignment. It sounds like a theory that should travel well into the age of AI, where uncertainty is often treated as a justificat

A certain kind of confusion sits quietly inside most organizations, and it shows up most clearly when measurement becomes the answer to everything. Someone says the firm needs “more control”, and the response is to add reporting, add dashboards, add compliance checks, add layers of review, as though structure and control were the same thing, as though a more elaborate org chart could stand in for the harder work of governing behavior. William G. Ouchi’s paper, written in the

Most organizations treat their org chart as if it were a neutral representation of who reports to whom, a simple map of accountability that sits above the work. Valentine, Pratt, Hinds, and Bernstein argue that this is a category error. In their account, the org chart is not merely a social diagram. It is an information-processing infrastructure that partitions a complex decision space into human-manageable pieces, assigns decision premises to roles, and makes performance leg

The important move in Ouchi and Maguire’s 1974 study is not the familiar claim that organizations control through either direct supervision or through metrics. The important move is that these two modes are not substitutes. They are different organizational functions, activated by different informational conditions, and they can coexist. That simple distinction matters because much of contemporary governance, including the governance of delegated AI agency, quietly relies on

There is a quiet but decisive shift embedded in the current wave of enterprise AI, and it is not primarily about models becoming more accurate. It is about delegation becoming real. Humberd and Latham’s argument is simple enough to state and hard enough to live with, because it takes a familiar organisational problem, the agency problem, and shows how it reappears when the firm hands decision rights to an artificial system that can act on its own initiative. The paper is less

Some papers matter less for the thing they study than for the mechanism they make legible, and Chua, Lim, Soh, and Sia’s account of clan control in a failing enterprise IT project matters because it explains, with unusual precision, how coordination becomes enforceable when outcomes are hard to specify and behaviour is hard to script. In the familiar portfolio language of control theory, formal controls remain necessary, but they become insufficient under complexity, and clan

The paper begins from a framing that matters for the DBA thesis because it removes the comfort of technical innocence. Drawing on Edwards’ notion of the workplace as contested terrain, it assumes that managers are structurally compelled to seek more value from labour, and that workers are structurally compelled to defend autonomy, dignity, and some right to say what counts. That does not mean every manager is cynical or every worker is heroic. It means the system has built-in