202504051619 Status: #idea Tags: #bureaucracy #institutions #government # Great institutions require planning and insight from the beginning The default state of institutions is failure and decay. It is extremely difficult to create an institution that not only successfully advances towards its goal, but does so in a way that perpetuates the institution itself over time. These rare, successful institutions are typically founded by great founders who design the institution well up front, since it is so hard to reform a badly-performing institution once its structure has ossified. A corollary of this is that it is very important to learn about the design of institutions and incentives and think about this a lot in advance when starting a company. Once the company is founded and hiring starts, it becomes much more difficult to substantially modify the company's structure. For example, Amazon's bias towards small teams that respond to issues quickly and proactively (rather than large teams that prioritize tasks via bureaucratic planning) would have been quite difficult to implement. ## Related Ideas - [[Maintaining functional institutions requires skill succession and power succession]] - [[Social technologies are the operating system for a civilization]] - [[One of the primary roles of a ruler or leader is to shape incentives]] - [[Creative destruction is required because we haven't solved the succession problem]] - [[Intellectual dark matter holds our society together]] - [[Power in an empire is determined by control of the central sub-empire]] --- # References [[Great Founder Theory]]