On Avoiding Mean Reversion
I've been thinking lately about why companies stop feeling like magic.
There is a specific, almost chemical change that happens in a growing organization. You start with a handful of people who want to change the world. The structure is flat, the chaos is high, and the air is electric. But then you reach a tipping point. It is a moment where the chaos stops feeling like freedom and starts feeling like a threat.
At this moment, the seduction of safety becomes overwhelming.
We start adding layers. We build processes. We tell ourselves we are "maturing," but often we are just building guardrails so that we can survive without brilliance. The tragedy of scale is that it becomes affordable to live without high performers. You build a machine where even a moderate employee can't crash the ship, but in doing so, you ensure the ship can never really fly.
This isn't malicious; it's natural. It is the gravity of the mean.
To resist this requires a counter-intuitive kind of discipline. The standard playbook says that as complexity grows, process must grow to match it. But the companies that endure do the opposite: they strip away process even as they get bigger.
They realize that "talent density" is the only real hedge against complexity. If you have the right people, those of high agency and intellect, you don't need to dummy-proof the system. You can afford a culture of freedom because you trust the people in the room.
But maintaining this density is exhausting. It requires uncomfortable conversations about compensation and retention. It means admitting that one person at the 90th percentile isn't just "better" than average; they are a different category of asset entirely. It means resisting the urge to let the high-performers drift away while the mediocre stay because it's "good enough." "Good enough" is the first symptom of the end.
Perhaps the most subtle shift, though, is cultural. As we grow, we stop managing the reality and start managing the proxy for reality.
We become obsessed with "account health scores" rather than whether the customer is actually getting value. We write proposals based on what we think leadership wants to hear, optimizing for optics rather than outcomes. We hide behind the dashboard because the reality is messy and ambiguous.
It creates a culture where we explain away disconfirming data rather than hunting for it. We crave the certainty of a "perfect plan" in a world that is inherently uncertain.
The default state of any organization is entropy. The natural current pulls us toward bloat, toward proxies, and toward safety.
Greatness, then, is not about being smarter than everyone else. It is about the sheer stamina required to swim upstream. It is the refusal to settle for the comfort of process. It is the commitment to look past the optics and stare directly at the messy, uncomfortable truth of where we are, and then, with the right people in the room, decide where to go next.