Hamel Husain argues that large committees slow down hiring and evaluation decisions, especially in smaller companies. He proposes instead appointing a single trusted person or tiny group to decide, cutting costs and delay while keeping the process actually workable.
Benevolent dictator is just a catchy term for the fact that when you're doing this open coding, a lot of teams get bogged down in having a committee do this. And for a lot of situations, that's wholly unnecessary. Like, people get really uncomfortable with, okay, we want everybody on board, we want everybody involved, so on and so forth. You need to cut through the noise. In a lot of organizations, if you look really deeply, especially small, medium-sized companies, there's really— you can appoint one person whose taste that you trust. You can do this with a small number of people and often one person. And it's really important to make this tractable. You don't want to make this process so expensive that you can't do it. You're going to lose out.
