fiefdoms

A bank is more like Ancient Greece, squabbling, semi-independent fiefdoms that only look united from the outside.

They'll have their own little fiefdoms where they can have witch hunts without a lot of press.

In practice, too much of the useful web is concentrated in a small number of fiefdoms.

Did you read the part about internal fiefdoms competing for a single pool of research money?

The business units get silo'ed, they build their fiefdoms, a consolidation project gets kicked off and fails, rinse, repeat.

These internal politics, if not focused on individual salaries, can instead focus on project head count, building fiefdoms, etc.

IT might be a bit in the early years, but of course these things grow as people need to build fiefdoms for themselves etc.

IBM is not a company, it's a collection of fiefdoms.

Of course, if the management structure is already divided up into little fiefdoms that the CEO has no effective control over, none of this matters much.

It got the site ramped up and turned into a reliable resource faster, and it also let people create their fiefdoms of influence where they wall out new users faster.

You could reduce the control moderators have to set their own rules, and that may help nudge conversation back in the direction of free speech from the current system of fiefdoms.

And you are correct, it is mostly due to the fiefdoms that have developed over a long period of time which have then been codified in layers upon layers of politics.

I've got a few friends who work there, and they all report that "the" Times is actually about five distinct fiefdoms engaged in a constant battle with one another.

This sort of "investment" is not very different from the sort of tribalistic "make it rain" spectacle you saw blowhard masters of local fiefdoms in Dubai pull, or continue to see in other Gulf Arab states, just to point to one widely-recognised example.

Without taking anything away from your company, I’m sure you will appreciate that in many companies, this business of “assigning you a bonus based on conversations with the project manager(s)” gets twisted into a horrible political game where people build fiefdoms based on tit-for-tat agreements, and where all sorts of biases come into play, e.g.