Eric D. Beinhocker

“Complexity catastrophes help explain why bureaucracy seems to grow with the tenacity of weeds. Many companies go through bureaucracy-clearing exercises only to find it has sprung back a few years later. No one ever sits down to deliberately design a bureaucratic muddle. Instead, bureaucracy springs up as people just try to optimize their local patch of the network: finance is just trying to ensure that the numbers add up, legal wants to keep us out of jail, and marketing is trying to promote the brand. The problem isn't dumb people or evil intentions. Rather, network growth creates interdependencies, interdependencies create conflicting constraints, and conflicting constraints create slow decision making and, ultimately, bureaucratic gridlock.”
― Eric D. Beinhocker, The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, And the Radical Remaking of Economics

“This tension between interdependencies and adaptability is a deep feature of networks and profoundly affects many types of systems. Software designers see it when a program becomes so complex that any enhancement or bug fix introduces five new bugs. Architects see it when a client asks them to move a wall just one foot, and it has knock-on effects that send the project's cost sky-high. Some biologists, such as Stuart Kauffman, believe that this tension creates upper limits on the complexity of organisms. In economic organizations, there is a clear trade-off between the benefits of scale and the coordination costs and constraints created by complexity.”
― Eric D. Beinhocker, The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, And the Radical Remaking of Economics