I’ve long thought that we should do away with the large form factor company. Inefficiencies down to communication, politics, direction, overhead in extra support roles, in my opinion far out weight the benefits of efficiencies of scale.
The basis for this first started materializing in my mind after reading Nassim Taleb’s Anti-fragile. Especially his commentary on the difference between a salaried individual and a self-employed cab driver. I think this analogy applies at a more macro scale. A singular company, 300 people strong, may have a whole department the size of a start-up that is entirely dysfunctional. This parasite on the larger organisation can remain in stealth. Look up “lying flat” (躺平) as an example of how this can be achieved. Their output does not cause any detriment to them in terms of employment, so motivations aren’t tied directly to being a benefit to society. Take that same size team, and make them a start-up. Look how they run out of money and have to be shut down. Shareholders of the larger company are accommodating this, although if you asked them if this was okay they wouldn’t hesitate in getting a consultant in to trim the fat.
Companies that I have worked for in the past that are under 30 people move with a hunger and purpose that I have not felt at companies larger than that. To the point that I’ve seen companies transition over this threshold and lose the spark for all the previous paragraph’s reasons. Jeff Bezos felt this, with his famous two-pizza rule.
Now I don’t propose limiting companies to 30 people under the current legal framework. That would be a nightmare. What once was the engineering team for cowlings at Boeing would be a separate company, keeping a business relationship would be an accounting and legal nightmare.
It would be a trade off between employee rights and company efficiency. Without due regard for individuals, it would be ideal that the jellyfish (due to their multi-organism structure) company could remove an efficient cowling engineering company with another at a drop of a hat. But to propose that would create a workforce that might be overly stressed and reduced in productivity out of conservative survival instinct. It wouldn’t be a realistic approach, one erring towards anarcho-capitalism, one that the government trying to get this new system through wouldn’t get a mandate for. After all, the population thinks of the government as a body to ensure the stability and welfare of their citizens.
One solution could be a form of “employee” rights for a company, stronger than existing contracts and invoice structures currently in place.