[kahawe]

I think the idea that you can just look at that one, oh-so-great management idea at Valve and then just apply it at your own startup or company is just more wrong than it might be right. All these places somehow grew into what they are doing now and there maybe were smart people making the "right" decisions along the way or it was simply nobody frakking up along the way and since money is still rolling in, everything is great. And what is working for them might be terrible at your place, no matter how romantically "right" it sounds. Maybe what you call Apple's "Stalinism" just worked because Steve was who he was - so all those suits now reading up on him and getting management ideas now because Apple is successful, that's probably a very bad idea because the topic is too complex and you are too likely to fail by just copying an idea without everything else that went into it at the place you are copying from.

[jacques_chester]

You've illuminated a good point that I completely failed to make: transplanting bits and pieces of a system into a different context often fails. The totality of a system matters. Especially in complex systems where the graph of causality is very vague.

My hobby is Olympic-style weightlifting. One thing that happens a lot in my sport is cargo-culting whichever country happens to be dominant at the moment. Back in the 1990s everyone got very excited about the "Bulgarian" training system, which was quite different from the "Russian" system which had dominated from the 60s.

In the USA in particular, wholesale attempts were made to adopt the Bulgarian system for elite athletes. Results? Very disappointing.

The context is wildly different. Bulgarian coaches had a feedstock of hundreds of thousands of lifters. If a lifter was wrecked by the extremely aggressive Bulgarian method, so what? You just replaced him with another lifter, there were plenty more coming up the pipeline. Given that in a larger sample you can find more outliers, mere numbers predicted a large fraction of the Bulgarian success -- and before that the Russian success.

Mere numbers today predict the success of China in the lighter divisions; mere numbers in future will predict that China will steadily improve in the heavier divisions as Chinese youth become taller due to westernised diets with more protein and calcium.

But the cargo culting has begun. Weightlifters already talk about "the Chinese System" as if there was some single, monolithic master plan. There isn't really. There's just a metric shit ton of Chinese weightlifters in the lower leagues and the elite international coaches can pick out the best of the best.

For the same reason, New Zealand is rugby superpower, nobody can beat the USA at gridiron, Australia is barred from entering the international Australian Rules Football contest because even our lowliest semi-pros dominate any such match up ...

[zorlem]

I do agree with your assessment of the sizes of the talent pools in Russia, USA and China. Back of the envelope calculations don't support your assessment of the Bulgarian talent pools though.

Your assumption that the Bulgarian coaches have a feedstock of hundreds of thousands of lifters is very far from the truth - the whole Bulgarian population is considered to be around 7.3M people, which doesn't account very well for all emigrants living abroad. Out of these 7.3M only 16% (~1M) are aged 0-17 (I assume that 14-15 y/o is the usual age that a lifter starts training professionally). That means that at the moment there are around 100K teenagers (aged 14-15), out of which less than 50K are male.

During the past 20 years sports have lost a big chunk of their (state) funding and therefore the attractiveness for young uneducated kids have lowered substantially, further reducing the pool of athletes.

I consider the three most prestigious and popular sports for males in Bulgaria to be football (soccer), wrestling and weight-lifting.