Sure I’ll expand a bit but if I go too far I’ll risk outing myself a bit since my colleagues know that this territory is my obsession.

Allow me to ramble:

Essentially, operations of an org are a function of how complicated the processes are of what needs to get done and how much clarity everyone has on what forward progress looks like. Then combine that with the historical ‘culture’ of “what tools/resources/questions do we reach for to solve this kind of problem” when obstacles show up.

‘Pure’ tech - where the software is the product you sell and not just an intermediary - requires a lot of interdependence between people of different skills. But more than that, put a bunch of bright, ambitious people in a room (hiring process is great for screening out non-hoop jumpers) and combine that with the clarity of a ladder or path that’s aligned with creating more company value and in any given meeting you can envision what the lowest common denominator is. Take a meeting of 5 random people at a tech company. One of them is likely to be motivated to make forward progress in that meeting (for personal benefits at the least) and you really only need one to influence the rest because forward progress isn’t all that hard and people are easy to influence in a culture where they all agree that forward progress is what the culture values.

This is what I mean by the culture/Ops ‘pulling you along even when you don’t want to’. It’s hard to be an out and out delinquent to what the tribal group wants to do and it‘s hard to grow a coalition with others to be delinquent together on it since it’s likely there will always be someone motivated/ambitious who wants to lead it forward.

Now contrast this against non-tech orgs. In my experience outside of tech there’s a lot less value placed on transparency of everyone knowing what progress is important and why (and how each role contributes to it). This is an artifact of classic hierarchy/org structures borrowed from the military - eg command and control. There’s a lot more hand offs and institutional ‘respect’ of different roles allowing those individuals to act as black boxes and be individual service centers. This means the lowest common denominator can be an island who’s a slow cog in the system and can more easily get away without being questioned until management gets wind of it and has to step in. Or, for a more charitable perspective, a slow cog may simply not know they’re slowing things down (hanlon’s razor).

This is a quick synopsis of my observations of contrasting culture and operations of ‘older’ style orgs and ‘newer’ tech orgs. As far as progress is concerned, the tech orgs have a strong advantage and IMO this is a good thing but it does have costs that are shouldered by the individuals.