[rglullis]

Not exactly on topic, but TFA talks about communication for companies of 500+ employees. I can not think of a company of this size and yet has only one product/service. Why do we need so many people?

I've always wondered what would happen if every company/corporation had a hard cap on its size and could not have more than 150 (a.k.a Dunbar's number) of people. Forget subsidiaries, conglomerates, etc. No individual could sit on the board of more than one incorporated entity, and any entity could not exert control over any other.

What would happen when a company started reaching this size? Would it start to focus on increasing productivity of the existing employees, or would they outsource absolutely everything that is not part of their core profit center and keep itself as lean as possible? How many layers of management would it have? What would happen with investment in R&D? Would this lead to companies being ultra-competitive for local markets or would competing companies form cartels and balkanize its customers in order to guarantee mutual survival?

Would tech companies still be able to follow the strategy of "grow first, find out how to make money later." My guess is they wouldn't, but would that be a bad thing?

[webmaven]

> I've always wondered what would happen if every company/corporation had a hard cap on its size and could not have more than 150 (a.k.a Dunbar's number) of people.

I get why you picked that number, but (like most people) you've overlooked that most individuals have folks outside of their current place of work occupying a lot of those slots: family, friends, former co-workers, teachers and classmates, members of your community, professionals in various capacities (your doctor, your kids' teachers, etc.), And so on.

So, if you want everyone in your org to know each other without intermediaries, you have to pick a number

> Forget subsidiaries, conglomerates, etc. No individual could sit on the board of more than one incorporated entity, and any entity could not exert control over any other.

It is not unheard-of for people to occupy board seats in order to serve as someone else's proxy. By limiting the number of boards a person can sit on, all you've really done is raise the expense of using such a proxy.

[rglullis]

I am not exactly expecting that everyone in the company to have as a strong personal connection as they would have with their family members and other parts of their society, just that 150 people would be enough to think of a "big company" in a ballpark where its employees/associates wouldn't be completely disconnected from one another and that it can have enough different specializations.

I see your point though. Do you think that a company of 150 is still too big for each associate to care about the individuals? What would be a better number, then? Half of that? A third?

> all you've really done is raise the expense of using such a proxy

Part of it, yes. But I think it's not just that. By putting a cap on the size of the corporation, you also would be limiting the leverage that any one leader of a corporation would have over the others.

[webmaven]

Dunbar's number isn't about "strong personal connections", it is the approximate number of people that the human mind can keep track of in terms of their identity and relationship to you (and vice versa) and to each other[0].

Anyway. If you expect everyone in an organization to have strong interpersonal relationships with each other, you'd probably top out at something like a dozen at most, and that's really pushing it. Eight or nine is a lot more reasonable, which, coincidentally, is about the size of a two-pizza team.

If you use the "two-pizza team" as an organizing principle (assuming a balanced tree), you can extend this to eight teams of eight, plus their eight managers, plus a ceo, with a total of 73 people, which is probably the point where relationship fatigue sets in and you can't claim to know everyone in the org even casually, unless you start dropping external relationships and the company is your social circle.

[0] If any. Just because two people both know you doesn't imply that they know each other. But if they do, you would probably know that and know what their relationship was. If everyone in the group had non-trivial connections to everyone else, the number of relationships in a group of 150 is over 11k.

[rglullis]

Are we talking past one another?

I'll repeat. I am not saying that the idea would be to have a company where everyone had to have strong personal relationships. My idea was to think of a company that is no bigger than the "number of people that the human mind can keep track of in terms of their identity and relationship to you" (your words) as way to have a company where everyone can at least make a distinction between the individual and the corporation (in my words, "care" about the people).

You are right that we should not expect "strong personal relationships" with more than a handful of people. But using Dunbar's number was just a way to get an first approximate sense of dimension of a company size that is not so big to the point where individuals become faceless.

It's more or less like life in a megalopolis vs a small town. Living in a small town does not have a personal connection with everyone, but there is a sense of a "everybody knows each other" even if the town has more than 150 people. less The question would then be: how big can a village or a town be until it loses the "everyone knows each other" feeling?

[webmaven]

Perhaps we are talking past each other. What may matter here isn't the size of the org per-se, but the degree of overlap between one worker's connections and another's.

People in a megalopolis don't necessarily have more or fewer connections per-se, but their connections are more widely distributed (often even close family members are globally scattered) and may not overlap at all with their neighbors'.