Why Every Company Now Looks the Same

The conference room in Dallas could have been anywhere. Not in the banal sense that all conference rooms share certain features, but in the more unsettling sense that this particular room, with its exposed brick, Edison bulbs, and motivational typography ("ITERATE FEARLESSLY"), had been precisely replicated in Stockholm, Singapore, and Santiago. The founder across from me, a former JPMorgan analyst turned insurtech entrepreneur, gestured at the reclaimed wood accent wall. "We hired a design firm to make our space 'unique,'" she said, making air quotes. "They delivered the same mood board they'd apparently given to half of Dallas. Terracotta planters, mid-century furniture, a neon sign saying 'HUSTLE.' I call it the mid-century-modern brain."

She wasn't wrong. Walking through the city's innovation district that morning, I'd counted four identical "living walls" of succulents, three variations on the same brass-and-marble reception desk, and enough Eames chair knockoffs to furnish a small museum. But the aesthetic convergence was merely the visible symptom of something deeper. When she pulled up her company's OKR dashboard, the same software platform used by her last three employers, I watched her navigate through performance metrics, sprint velocities, and employee engagement scores that could have belonged to any firm, in any industry, anywhere.

"Sometimes I forget which company I'm looking at," she admitted, toggling between browser tabs. "The KPIs are identical. The terminology is identical. Last week, our board asked why our 'employee net promoter score' was two points below the venture portfolio median. Not whether it mattered for an insurance startup. Just why we were below median."

This is the paradox of contemporary capitalism. The very technologies that promised to unleash organizational innovation have instead produced a monoculture. Every strategy deck deploys the same frameworks. Every reorg follows the same playbook. Every performance review cycles through the same rubrics. It's as if the entire corporate world is running on a single operating system, and nobody remembers who installed it.

The question isn't simply why this happened, though that story is worth telling. The deeper puzzle is why it persists. In competitive markets, differentiation should be an advantage. Yet from Mumbai's financial district to Munich's industrial corridor, firms are actively choosing to become more alike. They adopt identical structures, implement identical processes, and measure success through identical lenses. Instead of competition driving diversity, it now enforces conformity.

From Iron Cage to Control Protocol

Max Weber saw it coming, though he couldn't have imagined the specific form it would take. Writing as Germany industrialized, Weber watched traditional forms of authority give way to bureaucratic rationality. Rules replaced relationships. Procedures replaced judgment. The "iron cage" of rationalization would, he predicted, eventually enclose all of modern life.

But Weber's cage was still made of paper and human habit. Procedures were codified but interpreted by people. Workers retained what James Scott called "mētis," the local knowledge that makes organizations actually function. The gap between formal rules and informal practice was where human agency lived.

By the 1980s, organizational theorists noticed that firms were becoming similar not through coordination but through indirect pressure. Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell called it "institutional isomorphism." Regulations pushed companies toward similar structures. Professionals trained at the same business schools imported the same ideas. Uncertain firms copied apparently successful peers.

These forces were powerful but slow. A management innovation like the multidivisional corporation took nearly half a century to become standard. Even then, significant variation persisted. General Motors and Ford might both adopt divisional structures, but they implemented them differently, shaped by specific histories and cultures.

The digital transformation changed both the speed and totality of convergence. What emerged was something qualitatively different: algorithmic standardization. When work flows through software platforms, possibilities narrow to what the code permits. When performance is tracked through dashboards, only what's measured matters. When algorithms allocate tasks and evaluate outputs, human judgment doesn't diminish. It disappears into the background entirely.

This is where the concept of "control protocols" becomes essential. Unlike older forms of bureaucratic control, which operated through rules and hierarchies, protocol control operates through technical standards and default settings. It doesn't tell you what to do. It shapes what's possible to do. When every company uses the same project management software, with the same workflow options and the same reporting templates, convergence isn't a choice. It's an emergent property of the system.

The Three Engines of Corporate Convergence

Understanding how we arrived here requires examining three interlocking mechanisms. Each operates at a different level, but they reinforce each other in ways that make divergence not just difficult but often irrational.

Financial Pressure

In a conference room overlooking Sand Hill Road, a veteran venture capitalist explained why every pitch deck looks identical. "Founders think we want innovation," he said, pulling up a folder of recent presentations. "We do, in product. But in everything else, we want pattern recognition. Same metrics, same milestones, same mental models. When I see a company tracking unusual KPIs, my first thought isn't 'how creative.' It's 'what are they hiding?'"

This illuminates a core paradox. Markets theoretically reward differentiation, but market intermediaries reward conformity. VCs, analysts, and rating agencies have developed sophisticated evaluation tools, but those tools assume standardized inputs. A firm that reports its performance differently isn't just harder to evaluate. It's suspect.

This pressure cascades through the economy. Public companies face it from analysts who build models assuming standard metrics. Private equity portfolio companies face it from partners who want comparable dashboards across holdings. Even family-owned businesses face it from lenders who've standardized their underwriting criteria. The capital markets become a convergence machine, transforming organizational diversity into standardized legibility.

Consulting Diffusion

The second engine operates through professional networks at unprecedented scale and speed. Modern consulting firms don't just advise organizations. They reprogram them. When McKinsey develops a "transformation playbook" for one client, it becomes the template for entire industries. When Deloitte implements SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) at a bank, the same framework spreads to insurers, retailers, and government agencies.

A senior partner at one of the Big Four consulting firms described the process. "We used to customize everything. Spent months studying a client's specific context, designing bespoke solutions. Now? We have accelerators. Pre-built frameworks we configure slightly. Same workshop agenda whether it's mining or media. Same maturity models. Same roadmaps. Clients love it because it's 'proven.' We love it because it's profitable. Nobody asks whether it fits."

This standardization wouldn't be possible without supporting infrastructure. Certification programs, methodology frameworks, and software tools form an ecosystem. When the Project Management Institute certifies professionals in PMBOK, they're not just teaching skills. They're programming organizational DNA. When Spotify publishes its "squad model," it becomes religious doctrine, implemented faithfully even in organizations with completely different cultures and constraints.

Platform Lock-In

The third and most powerful engine is technological. When work moves onto platforms, possibilities collapse to what the platform permits. Standardization is what makes platforms valuable. Salesforce works because every sales process can be decomposed into leads, opportunities, and accounts. Workday works because every HR process can be encoded into workflows and approvals. The promise is efficiency through standardization. The price is organizational convergence.

A Fortune 500 CHRO described discovering this constraint. "We wanted to redesign our performance review process. Move away from annual ratings toward continuous feedback. Then we opened Workday and realized that's not how the system works. You can tweak the rating scale, change the labels, adjust the frequency. But the fundamental logic is locked. To do what we wanted would mean abandoning a $50 million investment and retraining thousands of managers. So we kept the old process and called it 'reimagined.'"

This lock-in operates at every level. Individual workers experience it when they can't customize their dashboards. Teams experience it when collaboration tools dictate communication patterns. Organizations experience it when enterprise platforms define possible structures.

The most insidious aspect is how these constraints become naturalized. After using JIRA for sprint planning, teams start thinking in two-week cycles. After using Slack for communication, organizations develop channel-based cultures. After implementing OKRs in software, strategic thinking narrows to what fits the quarterly objective format. The tool shapes the practice, and the practice shapes the organization, until nobody remembers that other ways were once possible.

The Cost: Eroded Agency

Template capitalism doesn't just reshape organizational charts. It erodes human agency within organizations. When algorithms assign tasks, software enforces processes, and dashboards define success, the space for individual judgment collapses. Workers become what philosopher Yuk Hui calls "algorithmic subjects," agents whose agency is pre-structured by technical systems.

This isn't the deskilling that Harry Braverman described in manufacturing, where complex craft knowledge was decomposed into simple tasks. It's more subtle: the replacement of contextual judgment with procedural compliance. A manager can't decide to skip a retrospective if the Agile framework demands it. A salesperson can't pursue an opportunity that doesn't fit Salesforce's pipeline stages. A designer can't propose a solution that the project management tool can't track.

The erosion happens gradually. First, the system makes suggestions based on "best practices" from aggregated data. Then it provides templates, pre-structured ways of working that save time. Then it enforces compliance through workflows that can't be bypassed and metrics that must be met. Eventually, workers internalize the system's logic. They stop imagining alternatives because alternatives seem not just impractical but inconceivable.

Ethnographic studies of tech workers reveal the pattern: employees using algorithmic management systems show less variation in problem-solving approaches and are less likely to propose novel solutions. They haven't become less capable. They've been trained to think within the system's constraints. As one developer put it: "I used to architect solutions. Now I configure services."

The Theory of Optimal Distinctiveness

Yet complete convergence remains elusive. Pockets of resistance persist, and some achieve remarkable success. Understanding these exceptions helps illuminate both the power of convergence pressures and the potential for escape.

Organizational theorist David Deephouse's research reveals an inverted U-shaped relationship between strategic differentiation and performance. Companies that conform completely to industry norms underperform. They compete on execution alone, with no structural advantages. But companies that diverge too dramatically also underperform. They forfeit legitimacy, struggle to attract resources, and can't leverage industry infrastructure. The optimal position is moderate differentiation: similar enough to be understood, different enough to be valuable.

This helps explain why certain companies successfully resist convergence. They typically share three characteristics.

First, strong founding cultures that predate modern management orthodoxy. Bridgewater Associates' radical transparency, W.L. Gore's lattice organization, Haier's self-managed microenterprises. These models emerged from specific contexts and founding philosophies, not consulting frameworks.

Second, business models that create space for experimentation. High-margin businesses, founder-controlled firms, and companies in emerging sectors face less pressure to conform. They can afford the efficiency losses of divergence because they're not competing on operational optimization alone.

Third, leaders willing to defend difference. Every successful organizational innovator tells stories of resisting pressure from boards demanding "industry best practices," from employees wanting familiar frameworks, from partners requiring standardized interfaces. Maintaining distinctiveness requires constant, active resistance.

But these exceptions prove the rule. For every firm that successfully maintains organizational distinctiveness, hundreds run identical processes. The successes are notable precisely because they're so rare.

Return to Dallas

Six months after our first conversation, I returned to the Dallas innovation district. The founder I'd met had embarked on her own escape attempt.

The mid-century-modern furniture was gone, replaced by an eclectic mix that employees had chosen themselves. The motivational posters had been replaced by whiteboards covered in diagrams I couldn't parse, some proprietary system they'd developed for project management.

"We killed OKRs," she said, with the slight smile of someone who'd committed organizational heresy and survived. "Also Scrum, NPS, and our performance management system. We build everything from first principles now. Ask what we're actually trying to accomplish, then design the minimal process that achieves it."

She walked me through what they'd done. First, a protocol audit. They mapped every software system that structured work, identified default settings they'd never consciously chosen, and calculated what percentage of their processes were externally determined. The number was embarrassing. "We realized we'd outsourced our organizational design to Atlassian and Salesforce without ever deciding to."

Then, conscious divergence. Not abandoning all standards, which would be chaos, but choosing where to conform and where to differentiate. They kept standard financial reporting, the legitimacy metrics that let them communicate with investors. But they built proprietary systems for everything that touched how people actually worked.

The results had been mixed but fascinating. Traditional productivity metrics had declined. But they'd launched products that competitors hadn't imagined, hired engineers that larger firms had rejected for being "non-standard," and dramatically improved employee retention. Their series B fundraising had been challenging, with investors asking for metrics that didn't exist, but they'd eventually found backers intrigued by their divergence.

"The hardest part isn't designing new systems," she reflected. "It's resisting the pull back to normal. Every new hire asks why we don't use JIRA. Every board meeting includes suggestions for 'proven frameworks.' Every customer wonders why our processes seem weird. You have to defend difference every single day."

This is the challenge and opportunity of our moment. Template capitalism isn't inevitable. It's a choice we've collectively made and could collectively unmake. The tools of convergence could, with conscious effort, become tools of divergence. The same digital technologies that enable standardization could enable mass customization of organizational forms.

But it requires recognizing that organizational monoculture is not just an aesthetic problem. It's an existential threat to economic dynamism. When every company becomes the same company, we lose not just diversity but possibility itself. The future depends on our willingness to resist the template, to defend difference, to imagine organizations as varied as the humans who comprise them.

The founder walked me out through their redesigned office. In place of the ubiquitous neon "HUSTLE" sign, someone had hung a handwritten note: "Build something that couldn't exist anywhere else." It wasn't professionally designed. It wouldn't photograph well for Instagram.

It was perfect.