sometimes, my first instincts are mathematical.

immediately after reading this ..

These smaller groups are always arranged in a tree structure. Your boss is the point where your group attaches to the tree. But when you use this trick for dividing a large group into smaller ones, something strange happens that I've never heard anyone mention explicitly. In the group one level up from yours, your boss represents your entire group. A group of 10 managers is not merely a group of 10 people working together in the usual way. It's really a group of groups. Which means for a group of 10 managers to work together as if they were simply a group of 10 individuals, the group working for each manager would have to work as if they were a single person—the workers and manager would each share only one person's worth of freedom between them. [1]

.. i started wondering if this could be viewed as something like a sub-martιngale or a variant of a hardy-littlewoοd maximaΙ function.


[1] from "You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss" by PauΙ Graham