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Indeed, this could generalize to any industry:

  Domain expertise (cooking, coding, whatever) - slow for one client
  Logistic expertise - fast for large numbers of customers, not clients
  Business expertise - becoming a legal and financial client
  Financial expertise - pure cashflow and accounting with little regard for the specific business model
The skills applied in labor-intensive work are not automatically transferable to capital-intensive work as you move down the list. That's why the CEO of McDonalds trained as an accountant, and has probably never worked a grill in his life; for the job he does managing a global corporation, learning to cook would have been a waste of his time.

ISTM that a key difference in left/right political philosophy is that the left thinks its more ethical to start at the bottom and work up, whereas the right feels it's OK to leapfrog as far ahead as you're able. A libertarian economist would argue that this maximizes both individual freedom and value across the economy as a whole, whereas a Marxian economist would argue that such maximization strategies exacerbate boom and bust cycles, like a car with an accelerator but no brakes.



I'll be a bit pedantic here, but Fred Turner, CEO of McDonald's from 1974-1987, started at the company as a grill operator.


I wanted to cite him too for that very reason, but since he departed 30 years ago the corporate culture has probably changed significantly.




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