Aaron Dignan, founder of The Ready, explains to Shane Parrish why government institutions stagnate compared to market-driven corporations.
0:00 / 0:39exact quote · 39.2s
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“The difference, though, is that there are very few feedback loops for the government. So one of the early kind of theories that I pull from a lot of sociocracy and the guy that kind of created the modern version of it talked about feedback constantly as like the lifeblood of everything. And so not just feedback at a person to person level, but system to system and marketplace to marketplace. And so with government, the feedback loops tend to be really, really poor because it has to be there. It's going to be there forever. To your point, there's a time horizon to it. But also, it doesn't really get, like, defunded next year if it doesn't do a good job. But a public company does.”
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