Cathy O'Neil Quotes

Anybody who's ever been in a large organization realizes that 'optimizing' is not a word that would often be used to describe any large organization. The reason is that it's full of people, who are complicated.

When you get big, there's a tendency to get caught up in process and bureaucracy.

As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge.

And I think it's true of any big organization... Bureaucracies and organizations make it hard to do the right thing sometimes.

Government and business are simple. It's only people that make them complicated.

Big bureaucracies in business and government—they fail too.

The chances of catastrophe grow as organizations grow in number and size, and as internal communications become more time consuming and less intelligible.

NASA's myriad failures are in many ways the natural consequence of a catastrophic combination of bureaucracy, monopoly, and a calcifying aversion to the kind of risk necessary for innovation.

The bigger a company gets, the more people are involved in decisions, the slower decisions get made. Look, the whole theory of startups is that three motivated people can go and do something that every company can't.

When business became big business - conglomerates employing hundreds and even thousands of people - companies divided themselves into still smaller units.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

My first company, Pure Software, was exciting and innovative in the first few years and bureaucratic and painful in the last few before it got acquired. The problem was we tried to systemize everything and set up perfect procedures.

For me, I think the bigger something is, the more difficult it is to make it nimble and fleet afoot.

In the larger companies, you have this tendency to get top-down direction.

Big companies are like marching bands. Even if half the band is playing random notes, it still sounds kind of like music. The concealment of failure is built into them.

The tendency in lots of large organizations is to try and find a comfortable place where you think you can get measured rewards for measured work.

A big company is like trying to steer a luxury liner.

In large organizations there are discrete functions. I do this; you do that. I swim in my lane; you swim in your lane. That can be very effective for certain processes and in certain stable conditions. But it doesn't work in unstable conditions.

If you have a reputation as a big, stiff bureaucracy, you're stuck.

We may well doubt whether our organization is not too complicated, too expensive; whether offices and officers have not been multiplied unnecessarily and sometimes injuriously to the service they were meant to promote.

Deep learning is a very capital-intensive area, and it's rare to find a company with both the necessary resources and a company structure where things can get done without having to pass through too many channels and committee meetings.

If you give the boss all the decision-making power, they see the world through their eyes. The big innovations are generally such a shift that they won't see it. For a long time, it looked like it was just inevitable that you would get slow and bureaucratic.

I think that the larger and more complex the business gets, I have to listen twice as much as I speak.

In large companies, the CEO is very distant from operations.

When I joined Google, it was a 1,500-person company, which I thought was huge, since I don't think of myself as a corporate person.