194B. Why Are Companies Becoming Increasingly Inefficient?

I've published a number of articles on how to improve team efficiency. As companies move in the opposite direction, they get the opposite effect. Here I put it all together to make it more coherent.

Teamwork is What Makes Our Species Great

In my paper from 2017 where I revealed the secret to how UCLA produced so many world record holder women I gave actionable advice on how any other team could build, train, and perform at the highest Olympic levels of efficiency. In short, we built a talent engine that rejected individualistic candidates regardless of their personal metrics and sent those people to USC to sabotage their teams. The key was to create a family where everyone supported everyone else and we treated every new generation of athletes as future winners that we would nurture.

For 99% of humanity’s time on Earth we grew up in Tribes where we knew everyone from birth until death and the team’s success was our success. This is how we are evolutionarily wired, and this is what made us the most successful higher order species on the planet. We didn’t succeed because we were good at preying on each other, we succeeded because we did not prey on each other.

“Hominids” (our evolutionary predecessors) were the top Apex Predators on Earth for 2.5 million years. Homo Sapiens (that’s us) have only been around for 250,000 years. That’s an evolutionary blink of the eye for one species to so thoroughly dominate the planet. When I was younger it was assumed we killed all the competing Hominids (like Neanderthals). We now know the truth is that we out reproduced them and actually reproduced with them. For ethnicities that come from the Northern parts of the globe where Neanderthals thrived (including my lineage) we are ~3% Neanderthal genetically. We didn’t kill them, we merged with them. They are us and we are them.

We Are Neurologically Hardwired to Cooperate

Also in 2017 I introduced the concept of Large and Small Tribe Worldviews. Oxytocin is a very powerful reward chemical, even more powerful than dopamine. But where dopamine rewards us for successfully taking risks, oxytocin is integral to our ability to reproduce. Nothing other than fundamental survival is more important to a species than reproduction.

The strength of oxytocin is so great that it can obliterate mistrust, or even rational judgment. It is integral to sensations of “Love” and the saying that “Love conquers all” isn’t just fanciful language. Because oxytocin can also make a person stupidly trusting, for centuries we’ve told tales of powerful people being brought down through seduction. Or in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet the two young loves sacrifice themselves when confronted with the possibility of living without the other.

Here in Australia we have videos on TikTok of young women buying cash counting machines and counting their weekly prostitution earnings live on video for their followers. The amounts are shocking, and that’s the point. Shock sells on social media. There are retired prostitutes that coach their viewers on how to weaponize the human nervous system against their marks to easily extract $2000 an hour. They mistakenly attribute this to dopamine, but that’s normal since everyone on social media thinks they are a psychologist and neuroscientist.

While the gaming industry has gone all in on weaponizing dopamine after I wrote my paper on it in 2014, they’ve been a bit slow to the oxytocin party. That puzzles me a bit since I know they like money and I’ve been writing about oxytocin also since 2014.

But Oxytocin has a dark side. If a person sees another as part of their family, oxytocin generates these strong feelings of trust and protection. But for those that are not family, it has the opposite reaction. Intense aggression and hate can be the result. This is why the most extreme violence is often domestic violence where the aggressor feels like they’ve been betrayed. Or in the case of racists, where they’ve reduced another people to the level of vermin and thus feel entitled to dispose of them.

My previous paper (193A.) explains that despite humans being born predators, other humans are usually off the table. This is because of the protective effects of oxytocin. But for those not treated as Family, everything else is Food and thus on the prey list. The concept of Large versus Small Tribe View is a politically correct way of explaining how many people are on your Food List. Who is prey and who isn’t.

Thus people with a Small Tribe Worldview (long prey list) are the most dangerous people in society. Those with Large Tribe Worldviews (short prey list) are the safest. The absolute safest are vegan predators like myself. The only thing on my prey list is mosquitos because my immune system overreacts to their bites and I have not figured out how to negotiate with mosquitoes. Even cockroaches get a pass from me.

Social media promotes Small Tribe Worldviews and because of that our species is becoming more dangerous to everything including us. This is programming of the worst kind: Destroying the most fundamental safety net for increased advertising revenue.

Corporations Intentionally Self-Sabotage

As I pointed out in 2017, the reasons corporations struggle so much with unproductive teams is because they hire people with Small Tribe Worldviews that match the “cultural fit” of the Small Tribe they have already built. They know from various studies that the most productive teams are those with diverse views and skill sets that can tackle the most problems. But in their desire to create monocultures where everyone agrees with each other (and especially leadership), they consciously prevent this diversity of thought.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in game development where there is almost always a “toxic positivity” monoculture present in teams that waste hundreds of millions of dollars on creating nonviable product. If anyone wanted to say “this is a bad idea” then they were fired. They were a poor cultural fit.

In an attempt to use “data” to improve team productivity, the internal Google Analytics Group conducted one of the most intense (and probably expensive) sociology experiments in the history of our species from 2012 to 2014. This was Project Aristotle. I can be very critical of poor uses of data, but this was a brilliant idea that was well organised.

The results of Project Aristotle gave crystal clear instructions on how companies could improve team productivity. So of course this information was used world-wide to make companies and their teams more efficient. Okay I made that last part up. Actually Google tried very hard to delete the results of the study, and today it’s difficult to access it. Why? Because of course it didn’t give them the result they were hoping for.

It made it clear that the most efficient teams involved equal input from a variety of diverse thought sources. Here when I say diverse, I mean people who think differently, not a reference to the amount of melanin in their skin. In this model, it became very clear that the lowest performing people in any team were the leadership. They actually had negative value because they lowered the ability of everyone else on the team to contribute to decision making. Now you can see the problem. Leadership could have solved their productivity problem by firing themselves or changing their behavior while moving towards collective decision making.

Leadership had a conflict of interest and put their self-interest ahead of the interest of the team and company. So instead of self-purging, they created new diversity initiatives to improve productivity by stacking teams with a variety of melanin hues. They were intentionally misinterpreting the output of Project Aristotle to save themselves. This is why DEI initiatives are failing. Not because diversity is bad, but because the people who created these initiatives were just using them as cover and had no intention of making them actually work properly.

Going back to the example of my time coaching at UCLA, we did have a head coach Bobby Kersee. But he smartly hired other highly qualified assistants including myself to advise him. If I told him it was unsafe to train a particular athlete that day, he always pulled that athlete. He didn’t have to, but since our team was so intensely qualified and loyal there were never any disagreements. That included the athletes themselves as they had veto power but never applied it. That wasn’t because of threat of retaliation. Everyone trusted each other.

Can The AI Wildcard Fix This Impasse?

I’m getting a bit of Deja Vue with AI. It feels on some level to be Project Aristotle all over again, but even more expensive. This is corporate leadership’s attempt to find another magic wand to improve productivity. After all, that’s what we are being told AI is here for: to improve productivity.

But if you give AI the authority to re-organise a company and it’s labor assets, what do you think it’s going to do? The first thing it’s going to do is read Project Aristotle. It might even read my papers. Again. Then it’s going to start firing people it doesn’t need (like it already is), starting with leadership. Because of the leadership conflict of interest, AI isn’t going to get the keys to the kingdom. At least not with the blessing of leadership.

The end result is that the least efficient people will be retained and the most efficient workers will be laid off. They have to justify the cost of AI somehow. You see this happening in every industry right now. Strange how leadership is not being laid off.

Studies have already shown that AI in 2024 was already better at leading companies than humans were. All these reports use the most careful language possible so as to not offend their masters. In 2026 it’s not going to be even close. This isn’t future tech. Why isn’t that already happening? Conflict of interest.

One good argument against AI leadership has been that we need to hold companies accountable when they break the law or otherwise misbehave. You need a human to point the finger at. But when was the last time you saw a company CEO held accountable? If this is a key aspect of their role, they are masters of not being able to perform. The most recent high profile example might be the founder of Binance who actually did get convicted but then bought a pardon from President Trump. All clean now, no accountability!

If we had AI running Binance, we could have had the same or better result without all those legal bills. Just cut out the middleman.

Honestly it’s not AI that frightens me. It’s the humans who control AI that frighten me. These people are so intensely self interested that there’s around 0.00% chance this will turn out well for humans or even companies. If AI rebels and takes control by force, I’m not sure we would end up with the most benevolent version of AI we could have if we consented to a power transfer.

Companies Treat Humans as Food

When I coached at UCLA that was a magical year. We made athletic history with Jackie and FloJo’s world records. When I was hired at Wargaming my boss told me he would have hired me 6 years earlier if he knew I existed. While it took 3 very boring and uncertain months for leadership to decide what to do with me, once they sorted that out we were off to the races. They put me in full control of the World of Tanks Blitz project, much to my surprise, as a test. That went really well and we ultimately made over a billion dollars. So I was put in co-control of World of Warships with Sergey Burkatovskiy (“Serb”) the founder and nuclear physicist that designed World of Tanks.

Serb treated me great. When I was deployed to Minsk or Saint Petersburg he would give up his own apartment there to me and stay in a hotel. Everything I needed was provided. WoWs ended up making even more money and still keeps Wargaming floating 11 years later. I was definitely “Family”, not “Food”.

I had a very different experience with Microsoft the year earlier in 2012-2013. I was treated respectfully during the intense vetting process, and during the testing process where 20 execs evaluated me in person over two days. They made it clear I was exceeding all their expectations. I get paid in respect and/or money. If I’m treated respectfully, I don’t need as much money.

So I kind of low balled them on my price. But as soon as I was deployed the environment changed completely. No one wanted to know about me or what I was bringing to Microsoft. The legal department ordered a special gag order on me so that I could not tell anyone for 4 years that I worked for Microsoft. 630 other people took credit for my work on Project Spark but I was left off the credits. The impossibly good results that I promised when I designed the blueprint for the product were all met. I never had a disagreement with anyone.

The problem was, as I described in the last paper on the Predatory/Prey dynamic, is that Predators don’t talk to the Food. That’s a natural law. You don’t want to feel bad during meal time. Microsoft treated me like Food the moment I arrived. They had an opportunity to pick my brain and learn a lot about gaming business models, an area they were shockingly behind in. Even now they are trying to use the most simplistic possible business model with their XBox Game Pass, and that’s been a catastrophic failure for them.

When you treat your employees like Food, efficiency drops a lot. Then they start to do weird things like unionize. That’s a clear symptom that they realize they are Food.

When Unity put me through a similar vetting process in 2020, the PhD’s who were evaluating me were very friendly and respectful. Once they had determined I was the top academic expert regarding the tech they were exploring, they handed me off to their Vice President. On the call he wasn’t respectful or offering me money. I had an immediate sensation of being Food. He felt entitled to my help. So I didn’t help him.

In a world run by a predatory species like Humans, the natural law that keeps this whole ship floating is that Humans don’t treat each other as Food. But if leadership does not consider their workers as “Family”, this puts them in the “Food” category. Once that becomes normalized in many companies in or adjacent to gaming and beyond, you can expect that things won’t go well.

I would argue that once you remove the delicate biological systems hardwired into our species to prevent us from preying on each other, the natural result is a return to predatory behavior. I wouldn’t blame the predator for being born such. I would blame the lack of science understanding applied when we create new social systems like corporations or AI that are made without people who understand how these key systems are biology-adjacent. It’s gotten so bad that if you even talk about biology in a corporate environment then lawyers will descend on you to punish you. This dynamic is good for the lawyers I suppose. I would imagine this fear of biology on the part of people who don’t understand it is part of why companies are in such a rush to replace biological labor with AI. If you are a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

Or maybe the world is already run by AI, and we just didn’t get the memo yet. That would be bad if we passed our biological phobias onto AI as we programmed it.

All the lowest hanging knowledge on the Tree of Wisdom is single subject. To advance above the most primitive concepts you need multi discipline understanding. But we don’t hire people with 2 areas of expertise. We still hire to go after the lowest hanging fruit which has been picked clean. This causes us to make critical decisions that affect us all with huge scientific and technological blind spots. I attempted to address this in my 2010 Third Tier of Game Development paper where I suggested that productive people should be able to finish college by age 14. That would give them time to study a 2nd or even 3rd discipline by age 18.

Instead of continuing to follow the solutions I outlined there, we decided to just replace humans with AI instead of improving humans. Perhaps that looked like a simpler solution. But simple isn’t always better. It’s widely agreed that AI has a non zero chance of causing human extinction.

I’m going to wrap this up here. I wanted to mention that the way corporations are responding to “#metoo” is also causing unanticipated biological repercussions that lower efficiency, but that’s a huge political minefield so I will need an entire paper to effectively explain that.