[rguzman]

I think the idea is to have small units instead of one large bureaucratic tree or similar structure. That way each unit can exert the necessary social pressure. Like Hates_ 13 says, semco is pretty large and it grew and continues to run efficiently this way.

On the other hand, maybe as the company scales (say to the size of GM) what you end up with is a tree of "units" because something or someone has to coordinate the effort so that the company stays on track. At ~1000 employees this it is probably just higher management (e.g., Semler and his team) and the aforementioned units. However, at larger sizes there is probably too many units for a single management team to coordinate, so you start having "management units" and then "management management units" and obviously this goes nowhere logarithmically :)

So you are probably right, but there is plenty of room at the top.