Stormy's Corner , Archive » Humans were not made to work in groups of a 1000

Humans were not made to work in groups of a 1000

Posted March 22nd, 2008 by stormy and filed in Business, Career

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I read an interesting essay by Paul Graham today, You Weren’t Meant to Have a Boss. Paul theorizes that humans are meant to work in groups of 8-20. So when you put more than that in an organization, you start to lose freedom in order to keep organization.

A group of 10 managers is not merely
a group of 10 people working together in the usual way. It’s really
a group of groups. Which means for a group of 10 managers to work
together as if they were simply a group of 10 individuals, the group
working for each manager would have to work as if they were a single
person—the workers and manager would each share only one
person’s worth of freedom between them.

He then goes on to explain that working for a large organization is like eating junk food.

The average MIT graduate wants to work
at Google or Microsoft, because it’s a recognized brand, it’s safe,
and they’ll get paid a good salary right away. It’s the job
equivalent of the pizza they had for lunch. The drawbacks will
only become apparent later, and then only in a vague sense of
malaise.

Anyone who has watched a big company struggle to make a decision, or been part of that struggle!, will find themselves nodding at some point. Something to think about.