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Here is the take away of this article: Management nautrually conforms to Sarnoff’s law when they should activly instrument Reed’s law driving internal data science.
The predominant form of communication for top-level management today is a point to point model. Often illustrated in Metcalf’s first step (not shown here). This has surprising consequences for corporate communication and its emergent properties. You may think Slack, Teams, Chat, and a host of other tools are the answer. It is not, as I will explain.
An evolutionary step for management has been Sarnoff’s law. All nodes are feeding the center while the center broadcasts to the nodes. You might see this as quarterly reports and all-hands meetings — a real revolution of the last century.
The behavior, size, and complexity of the resulting communication networks as described by Metcalf’s law, in which each point is a node connected to many nodes. For example, in the most straightforward interface, two nodes (A and B) that communicate to form one edge (A-B). As more nodes are added, complexity increases depending on how the nodes are connected.) This yields many point to point communications but assigns no value to groups or the lines inherent between them.
