It's a wonder cities don't just fall apart and stop functioning completely without someone taking an attendance headcount everyday and peaking over their shoulders to make sure they are doing their job.
Cities don’t have a particular mission statement, so that kind of comparison isn’t apt.
My point was that in a city people are semi anonymous and others don’t keep tabs in you and know whether you’re a slacker, a thief, the town millionaire, the job producer or not. In a small town folks know to some degree who is vandalizing, doing the graffiti, stealing the cattle, helping farmer John with the fences, bringing food to the widow, etc.
There’s a distributed system of loosely coupled organizations in charge of making cities work. They coordinate by a price system for many urgent voluntary transactions and by bureaucratic organizations with supervision for others. In neither case do they rely on people just doing their jobs because it is the god and honorable thing to do.
Was Yahoo! incredibly more productive and efficient after Marissa fired all these slackers ? That doesn't seem to be the story we've seen unfolding from there.
Some had “multiple jobs” and both or more employers were getting the short shrift.
Small orgs are like small towns, everyone knows who’s up to what. Large orgs are like cities…