The British feudal society was not so clearly hierarchical. Now, he says it's a "gross simplification", with the goal of expressing some underlying truthiness. But over and over again he says that people in the hierarchical system don't question their position.
See the Magna Carta and the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 as two examples where people did question their position under the feudal system.
See matrix management and dotted line manager as examples of modern attempts at alternatives to strict hierarchical structures.
The speaker complains about the lack of internal markets at a large company. OTOH, the promotion of internal competitive markets is often described as one of the reasons for the downfall of Sears. See http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/07/16/do-inter... :
> The model “also created a top-heavy cost structure, according to a former vice president for human resources. Because Sears had to hire and promote dozens of chief financial officers and chief marketing officers, personnel expenses shot up. Meanwhile, many business unit leaders underpaid middle managers to trim costs.”
> For innovation, internal markets have the same problem as hierarchical bureaucracies. Managers vote their resources for innovations that bolster their current fiefdoms and careers. The safest strategy is to stick to the status quo. Ms. Kimes’ article gives multiple examples where competing managers at Sears looked after their own units at the expense of the interests of the firm as a whole.
There's also the problem that he compares companies to feudal societies, without the awareness that feudalism is relatively new. The Roman Empire had a non-feudal society, but was still structured hierarchically.
In fact, to quote from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism#History_of_feudalism :
> Feudalism, in its various forms, usually emerged as a result of the decentralization of an empire: especially in the Carolingian empires which both lacked the bureaucratic infrastructure[clarification needed] necessary to support cavalry without the ability to allocate land to these mounted troops.
The speaker describes feudalism as a centralized command-and-control system. That doesn't fit the idea that it's a decentralized system, with respect to an empire.
Is a company structure more like late feudal England? Or like Imperial Rome? If the latter, then it's wrong to say that modern companies are "feudal".
Edit: Grr! And it's like the 1950s-era push towards flat corporate structures never existed. Nor the co-op movement like Mondragon Corporation.
I would also point out that matrix management switches corporate hierarchies from trees to graphs: it doesn't change its fundamental nature of command and control. It's an attempt to tinker with how things are done and frankly, it's about as revolutionary as having car doors open backwards instead of forwards (and in my experience with matrix management, it's just as stupid of an idea).
As for Sears, thank you for that link. Yes, there are definitely going to be cases of companies trying and failing. How does that invalidate the point?
As for your other comments, I'm not going to belabor them, but there's a rich, rich background of people comparing modern corporations to feudalism: https://www.google.fr/webhp?q=corporations%20feudalism#safe=...
Or you can read this interesting one by the former chief economist of Valve Software: http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/why-valve-or-what-d... (if that face looks familiar, it's because he's now the finance minister of Greece).
Again, 35 minutes to give an simplification of the problem and I know there's tons I left out (including co-ops) and there's absolutely no way I could cover it all and still get to the point of that talk.
What David Graeber's "Debt: The First 5000 Years" years has taught me, above all else, is that most economists from Adam Smith onwards know little about history and anthropology. I already knew that people like to spread just-so creation myths. In many cases, these end up being ungrounded in reality, but instead are meant as short-hand for the general culture belief of how something worked, rather than the reality.
A somewhat relevant example, look at http://westernreservepublicmedia.org/middleages/feud_peasant... as an example of how people tell untrue stories about the Middle Ages. The source is the Northeastern Educational Television of Ohio, and the page says "The main crops were corn, wheat, and beans. Near their homes, peasants had little gardens that contained ... tomatoes..."
In the US corn means maize -- "Indian corn". In the England "corn" refers to wheat, and in Scotland and Ireland it refers to oats. So either this is saying that maize (and tomatoes) somehow made it from the Americas to Europe before Columbus, or that the main crops were "wheat, wheat, and beans." Either way, it's wrong.
Here are more specific issues I have with your simplifications:
1) "The Feudal Era ... I specifically picked England, post-Reformation, after Henry the VIII."
The feudal era was already in decline by that point. Compare your statement to https://medieval-global-studies.wikispaces.com/Feudalism :
> At the end of the middle ages, feudalism still somewhat existed, but King Henry VIII gave the last blow. In the feudal pyramid, the pope was higher than the king. King Henry VIII broke away from the pope, and the feudal system had ended.
This is relevant because the Irish people believed that the Pope was the feudal head of Ireland, with Henry acting at the Pope's representative.
Or to http://karelma.com/english/history/henry-VIII.html :
> Thomas Wolsey ... was tirelessly ambitious, very quick-witted, and also ingratiating by aptitude, which appealed well to Henry VIII. Together they gave a strongly anti-feudal, reformist character to the politics.
Or to http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/content/docs/Decline%20of%20... :
> It follows that [feudalism's] disappearance [in England] between c.1300 and c.1500 changed medieval society fundamentally.
Or to http://www.sixwives.info/henry-viii-accomplishments.htm :
> King Henry VIII added Imperial concepts of Kingship to existing Feudal concepts
I cannot accept your use of a post-Henry VIII England as being representative of a feudal structure. By all accounts, feudalism was a minor part of Late Medieval England. I find it easier to believe that it's representative of a new and growing imperial structure, and an increasing centralization of power.
Compare England to Sweden, which did not have serfdom. The Swedish Empire was from 1611 to 1721. During that time, Sweden was one of the great powers of Europe. Your thesis would mean there are some intrinsically important differences between the absolute monarchy in England and the absolute monarchy in Sweden, because one was based on serfdom and the other was not.
Could you describe a few of the key differences between the hierarchies of the English and Swedish monarchies of the 1600s that were due to serfdom? Because I can't think of any, and your thesis requires that there be key differences.
2) "Allegiances in feudal societies tended to be very local ... why did all the soldiers follow Macbeth?"
This is, well, nonsense. Why did the soldiers follow Julius Caesar? Or for the same time period, look to Norway. Norway never had a feudal society. Why did all of the Christian, medieval, people of Norway follow their kings, even into battle?
Macbeth is nominally about Mac Bethad mac Findlaích, who died in 1057. Feudalism came to Scotland later, as part of the Davidian Revolution (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davidian_Revolution ) during the reign of David I (1124–1153).
So not only are you using a fictional example to justify your views, but that fiction isn't even historically accurate.
