The DoD (!) is hardly representative of the cultures being discussed in the linked article, which is about tech startups (with a bunch of examples from medicine too). Yes, there are worse examples, but those may be beyond help.
As an enterprise grows, you either retain centralized control and have hierarchy, or distribute control by treating parts of the org like independent, federated entities (think Berkshire Hathaway).
The military's size, scope, and mission are unique. You need top-down control, because otherwise most folks won't decide to run up a hill into a machine gun on their own. That mission focus (do stuff with force), cascades into the supporting services.
Tech start ups are a rather small part of the overall IT industry. I dont really have the numbers to back it up, so i am not going to speculate as far as the actual numbers, but any discussiona bout workplace IT that ignores everything that isnt a tech start up is virtually useless.
And the IT industry is a rather small part of the overall job market. So therefore any discussion about the workplace that ignores everything that isn't IT is virtually useless?
I fail to see how governmental organizations should fall outside the scope of the discussion.
And the Air Force is not the DoD. While, technically, the individual branches of the US military fall under the DoD, they all have very different organizational cultures, and the DoD has staff and culture of its own.
> I fail to see how governmental organizations should fall outside the scope of the discussion.
I won't tell you what falls within the scope of this discussion or not, but I can tell you why they don't add a lot of value to it either.
It's already quite hard to somewhat objectively discuss whether a business company is dysfunctional, in part, or not at all, and what are the reasons for that.
It's almost entirely useless to attempt to have that discussion about government. Because politics. Because people root for their home team. Because people are inclined to dismiss the other team's ideas even when they're real good. If I told you the US Government is dysfunctional, someone would counter that I'm not American and I should see my own government. If we move past that and we got into the details of why things are not working properly, invariably Americans will start quoting bits of the constitution, bill of rights and foundling fathers at each other (and from there on it just becomes religion to me).
Discussing whether the function of Military organisation is working properly is even more difficult. In addition to the above problems, there's also hazing and indoctrination, which are incredibly strong psychological forces (without those, like said, people won't run into their deaths without question). And it pretty much divides the crowd in two slices, those "outside" that have no idea how it really works, and those that have been "inside" who are unable to disconnect the indoctrination bits from forming an objective judgement about how well the organisation functions and how that comes to be.
Certainly, discussing businesses has similar problems, but this just amps up the personal emotion factor to eleven. Also one of the reasons why the businesses were kept anonymous in the featured article.
