Jeremy McEntire

For twenty-five years, Jeremy has built and led engineering teams—at Intel, at Twilio, at startups that scaled and startups that didn't. His roles have spanned the full scale spectrum: ten-person teams where decisions happen over lunch, and organizations large enough that decisions require committees to approve the committee structure.

He has worked as chief architect and CTO inside early-stage startups and larger technology environments where scale pressures expose the underlying physics of organizational behavior. He came to organizational theory not through institutional pathways but through necessity: observing intelligent people in well-designed systems systematically degrading their own capabilities.

The book didn't start as a book. It started as a question that wouldn't resolve: why do smart people inside well-run organizations produce outcomes nobody wanted?

Existing explanations—bad leadership, misaligned incentives, cultural dysfunction—kept failing to predict. The failures weren't random. They had structure. Stepping outside the structures that shape most leadership thought made the patterns easier to name—not because they were hidden, but because distance makes them clearer.

When existing frameworks failed to explain what he saw, he began constructing his own from first principles—integrating mathematics, systems theory, corporate law, and empirical analysis into a unified explanation of organizational dysfunction.

The ideas in this book aren't new—Weber saw the iron cage forming over a century ago. What's new is the precision of the mechanism: the mathematical proof that certain organizational dysfunctions aren't accidents or failures of leadership, but structural necessities. Anyone who has lived inside a system like this will recognize the pattern. The book gives that pattern a name and a physics.

McEntire writes and consults on organizational design, leadership, and the physics of coordination at scale. He lives and works in Oklahoma City.