It seems, for lack of unit tests, real-life almost never removes code from bureaucracies, and achieves efficiency only by replacing the whole organization.
By the way, I think this is why communism failed. I don't think their error was for companies to be state-owned. The problem was that, in the pursuit of efficiency, they merged all companies in a sector into one combine, thus making it impossible to replace (today we would say "too big to fail").
Maybe the communist/socialist bloc would've been more successful if they had retained multiple state-owned corporations in each sector and allowed for competition between them.
Disclaimer: I was born in 1989, so everything I know about communist/socialist economy, I know from books or from talking to my parents.
You might like to read Red Plenty. The problem isn't the size of the companies as such, it's the notion of planning the economy.
If you allow multiple corporations but oblige them to follow the same plans, that does nothing to address the problem. If you allow the corporations to compete in a market economy then, well, you have a market economy.
