A lot of answers to these questions, and the questions themselves, come from further down the food chain.
The flip side of the coin is that no start-up is moving a billion tons of rice, or can park an army off a foreign shore in a week, or lay 10,000 tons of steel rail across a continent every day, or delivery a million packages a day, or make 10,000 processors a day, each with the complexity of the entire European system of roads.
So speed is relative to the size of the task at hand. Large enterprise can move big things so fast it literally takes the air out of the room.
You're missing one piece which degrades performance of all corporations over time - bureaucracy with politics. I don't mean the sane one, I mean processes for the sake of processes, people entrenched in their comfortable managerial positions, battling any change that doesn't benefit them directly. I mean brutal management pyramids, so often seen in older corporations or banks for example.
It comes naturally over time, every single time. Organization can fight it, but it needs to be a dedicated effort and priority. If let on its own, complexity arises.
I've seen medium-sized young companies trying hard to have flat hierarchy and least amount of processes, committees etc. It worked. It really did. But everybody understood this is the goal, it was clearly communicated. It attracted amazing talent of brilliant people fed up with the (common) opposite.
I can see now in oldish bank how a simple change might involve 20 people having their say, often managers with their own political agenda not always aligned with what's best for the employer. Stuff that gets actually developed in 2-3 MDs takes overall easily 10-20x more because of this.
So much this. It gets so bad that at some of these places, there are folks whose real value seems to be in "knowing the right people" in the org to who get certain things done rather than any real technical/managerial skills.
Knowing the right people (and its corollary, knowing how to find the right people) are critical managerial skills. I've seen otherwise great managers struggle to get anything done, because they keep trying to push on people who can't enact the changes they want.
That's gross, but the overall organization is still efficient (or it has some sort of monopoly or huge moat). Otherwise it would be completely out of business by now.
It's efficient at it's stated tasks. Usually this is tied to stock prices.
I'm working at a Fortune 500 currently that does a lot of chemical manufacturing. Outside of delivering boatloads of chems, everything in the company is a constant clusterfuck. Stock price stays alright so nothing changes.
I think this is some kind of law: Every company is good at only those things where external pressure is high, and usually those are sales and whatever they are selling. Everything else has little external pressure to work well, and because the natural state of things is suckage and stagnation, everything else sucks and is stagnant.
> So speed is relative to the size of the task at hand.
I think of organisational decision making like organic decision making - that the speed of the organisation's reactions are dependent upon its frame of reference. The frame of reference here is the time between sensing and reacting.
The eyes and ears of small businesses are very close to the brains, and so decisions can be made rapidly by the small number of people who have capability to marshal resources into a response.
Enterprises have layers of processing between the eyes and brains, along with many more sensors than a small business, meaning that questions take longer to be settled and decisions made. However no small business can wield the same power as a large organisation when the army of deciders all focus on a single outcome.
The flip side of the coin is that no start-up is moving a billion tons of rice, or can park an army off a foreign shore in a week, or lay 10,000 tons of steel rail across a continent every day, or delivery a million packages a day, or make 10,000 processors a day, each with the complexity of the entire European system of roads.
So speed is relative to the size of the task at hand. Large enterprise can move big things so fast it literally takes the air out of the room.