[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'.