No offense, but nature of these replies sounds more like someone parroting tech speak than someone applying principles that have a context beyond just tech or AWS.
>scale free organizational culture
The fact that the meetings are bottlenecked by decision makers ability to synthesize information imply it is not, in fact, “scale free”. Scale free would imply there are not such bottlenecks.
I agree it’s about developing resilient processes. What you allude to is not that, because it implies single points of failure within decision-making, bottlenecks etc. It doesn’t come across as a clear understanding of true process-oriented culture.
>he reads the document and there aren’t Oxford commas he ends the meeting and you have to reschedule
I can’t know, of course, but I suspect this has more to do with ensuring due-diligence than document formatting. It’s the same thing Van Halen did in the 1980s by requiring brown M&Ms removed from the bowl in their dressing room. It was a quick heuristic to ensure the venue read their rider/contract completely and adhered to it because a lack of due diligence in set design, pyrotechnics etc. would have been a major safety issue. I’m willing to bet checking for a lack of Oxford commas is shorthand for “what other details did they miss?”
>And that number is a lot because Amazon is enormous
Again, this implies the opposite of “scale free” culture. A true scale free org wouldn’t have any nodes with a large number of connections. A large number of decisions does not mean any single individual has to involved in those decisions directly. Why is he not willing/able to select someone capable of making those decisions? (Honest question to understand the dynamic).