Many teams are being measured for the wrong things: tokens used, agents deployed, etc. Their orgs have focused on tech adoption rather than value creation. It’s a mistake. I wanted to discuss this with Harry, so I read a passage from one of my favorite books, James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State. To my surprise, he’d read it too. I won’t cite the whole passage, but it kicks off with a familiar distinction: Isaiah Berlin, in his study of Tolstoy, compared the hedgehog, who knew “one big thing,” to the fox, who knew many things. The scientific forester and the cadastral official are like the hedgehog. The sharply focused interest of the scientific foresters in commercial lumber and that of the cadastral officials in land revenue constrain them to finding clear-cut answers to one question. The naturalist and the farmer, on the other hand, are like the fox. They know a great many things about forests and cultivable land. Although the forester’s and cadastral official’s range of knowledge…
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