There are not a lot of CEO of big companies and those who are believed to be competent can draw huge salaries. Even if all the CEO would be competent the total pool of people might be still quite small.
There’s also the interesting question of why we have successful cities that have lifespans of hundreds of years that get a lot less management and why companies that are managed by a CEO fail so often.
Why is the organization form of a city so much more stable?
Because demand for cities isn’t volatile? Like, if you’re a company, you’re operating in the market, where people have a choice whether to use/buy your product/service. If what you’re producing isn’t high-quality/doesn’t meet a market need, your company fails (and the quality of the product is often a direct consequence of a CEO’s decisions).
Conversely, with cities there’s a lock-in: people build lives there; they invest in their houses, communities, and personal relationships. Cities are not nearly as fungible as (almost all) products. So even if the city is poorly run, people have strong incentives to stay there rather than moving elsewhere.
Plus, a city is more than its organizational structure: it’s the geographical features, the businesses that operate there, and the people who live there. (To some extent the latter two are downstream of the city’s organization, but they’re definitely not fully determined by it).
tl;dr it’s a lot easier to lose customers than to lose citizens. I don’t think the situations are all that comparable or that we can learn anything meaningful about competence by looking at the success of the average city.
There are not a lot of CEO of big companies and those who are believed to be competent can draw huge salaries. Even if all the CEO would be competent the total pool of people might be still quite small.
There’s also the interesting question of why we have successful cities that have lifespans of hundreds of years that get a lot less management and why companies that are managed by a CEO fail so often.
Why is the organization form of a city so much more stable?
Because demand for cities isn’t volatile? Like, if you’re a company, you’re operating in the market, where people have a choice whether to use/buy your product/service. If what you’re producing isn’t high-quality/doesn’t meet a market need, your company fails (and the quality of the product is often a direct consequence of a CEO’s decisions).
Conversely, with cities there’s a lock-in: people build lives there; they invest in their houses, communities, and personal relationships. Cities are not nearly as fungible as (almost all) products. So even if the city is poorly run, people have strong incentives to stay there rather than moving elsewhere.
Plus, a city is more than its organizational structure: it’s the geographical features, the businesses that operate there, and the people who live there. (To some extent the latter two are downstream of the city’s organization, but they’re definitely not fully determined by it).
tl;dr it’s a lot easier to lose customers than to lose citizens. I don’t think the situations are all that comparable or that we can learn anything meaningful about competence by looking at the success of the average city.
Cities do need customers for the products that they export as well. Otherwise they can’t import the food to feed their population.