The perennial issue for competent organizations as they scale is the quality of the middle management. Alex didn't write anything about hierarchies of molds (because it most certainly isn't moldy all the way to the top and never was). His pithy slides also don't discuss hiring practices at Google for managers. [We all know how they grill us poor doers.] He also failed to mention our dear friend Peter of the principle fame.
p(goal) = f(p(planners), p(managers), p(doers)) is a more realistic equation. What that f() looks like depends less on organizational structure than on the quality of the workers that mediate planning and building.
As the corporate organism itself grows larger and faces newer challenges, it may need to evolve and develop new, more specialized organs that a slime mold does not inherently possess or function well at to scale.
Many organisms in the natural world could not scale exactly as-is to 10x or 100x their normal size with their existing structures.
The idea of a slime mold representing the whole company may have once been true a decade or more ago when Google was much smaller and less extended, but the mental model is much like newer people at Google yearning for the "old Google" that never worked there during its earlier days. It's a nice fantasy.
The perennial issue for competent organizations as they scale is the quality of the middle management. Alex didn't write anything about hierarchies of molds (because it most certainly isn't moldy all the way to the top and never was). His pithy slides also don't discuss hiring practices at Google for managers. [We all know how they grill us poor doers.] He also failed to mention our dear friend Peter of the principle fame.
p(goal) = f(p(planners), p(managers), p(doers)) is a more realistic equation. What that f() looks like depends less on organizational structure than on the quality of the workers that mediate planning and building.
https://hbr.org/2021/06/the-real-value-of-middle-managers