Though Buffett is the architect of Berkshire Hathaway, I think much of its continued success and compounding ability can be attributed to the decentralized and autonomous culture. Without it, anyone should be able to put together an insurance and railroad company together and run something similar. 

“Growth is driven by compounding, which always takes time. Destruction is driven by single points of failure, which can happen seconds, and loss of confidence, which can happen in an instant.”

Munger once said that compounding shouldn’t be interrupted unnecessarily and most investors consider this in the terms of not selling businesses in their portfolio. But this can be applied to businesses themselves. Businesses are a mere collection of people and if we consider how individuals require momentum to achieve something, the same can be said of the collective entity of a business. So, when shit falls apart, it can take a long time to build up the collective momentum. Jim Collins’s flywheel is the inverse where once momentum rolls forward, it compounds in strength and velocity. The latter seems to only be possible in truly decentralized operations. 

Taleb’s concept of antifragility, when applied to businesses, makes me think of companies who can thrive in moments of crisis. Not just crisis in their economic environment but also within. Quite akin to the concept of creative destruction. Companies that are capable of destroying loved ideas to build upon it or that have units that aren’t so tied together to falter all together because of one bad apple but are apple to respond independently to the demise of a bad apple to make the other units stronger. 

“Everything that can happen will happen.” - Warren Buffett. 

There is no way a company, especially one that thinks with complete homogeneity, can prepare for all things that can destroy it. It can also be harder to tear down major views when everything is centralized because of the inertia of momentum that is so codependent on all parts of the organizational structure. To be able to respond to the inevitable disasters, the ability to react (potentially with a number of different solutions) needs to be cultivated inside an organization. This probably requires independent thinking to exist at various levels of an organization and I don’t see how that can be possible without decentralization being a core factor. 

At the very least, decentralized systems can avoid a total blowup.