In reply to Lawrence de Bivort's message of Sun, 9 Mar 2008 08:52:34 -0400: Hi, [snip] >Partly it is a matter of Reverting to the Mean, and partly a matter of there >being only so many genuinely brilliant leaders and with size their net >impact is diluted by the inevitable bulk of mediocre people in a large >corporation. > >Partly it is a matter of administrative systems becoming so bulky and >unwieldy that taking action and decision-making are themselves compromised >by bureaucratic values and ponderous processes.
There is another very subtle factor which plays a role in large organizations. Management naturally sees it as their role to make choices. A small organization has few people, and consequently few people proffering ideas. This makes it relatively easy for good ideas to be selected and tried (there aren't that many of them). However as an organization grows decisions are frequently shuffled up the hierarchy until they reach top management, which is then in the position of having to "choose" between many ideas, some of which would be good and some not. Furthermore, because the depth of the hierarchy tends to increase with the size of the company, so does the distance between the originator of an idea, and the person ultimately responsible for deciding whether or not to implement it. This hierarchical distance means that the decision makers frequently lack an intimate understanding of the pros and cons of the various ideas. All of which usually leads to a "safe" decision of "business as usual". IOW few new ideas get tried. The solution to this problem, is of course to try *all* new ideas on a small scale, and let each of them succeed or fail on their own merits, then those that succeed can be implemented on a larger scale. This effectively converts a large company into a sort of conglomerate of small departments, each succeeding or failing. Small parts of the organization that fail are immediately "killed off", and those that succeed are further stimulated. In short the hierarchy itself is dynamic rather than static. Killing off a department doesn't necessarily mean that people are fired, just that they are moved into departments that are growing rather than those that are failing. Regards, Robin van Spaandonk The shrub is a plant.
