[mandevil]

I don't think it's enterprise deals. I think it's communication at scale, internally. Imagine a company of m employees as a giant m*m matrix of communication slots, with a 1 for regular close communication, a 0 for no communication at all, and a 0.5 for those hallway meetings that we are assured by our CEO's are why RTO is so important (this would be those backchannels if you RTFA).

A small company, (let's say, below Dunbar's Number) has a matrix of almost all 1's just naturally. But as the company grows that matrix gets sparser and sparser- by the time you get to something like Google (180k employees plus roughly that many again contractors) you have almost all 0's with only a few 1's scattered through it. But information still needs to flow through the company, from outside a given two pizza team in, e.g. "build this not that," or from the team out, e.g "this project sucks and needs to die," or from the side, e.g. "Group Digut solved that problem that you are facing, use this package they wrote" or more personal things, e.g. "employee 24601 is awesome and needs more responsibility."

But that information is actually hugely important to the company, in an important sense all of that information is the company. So important that companies formalize the responsibilities of that information flow with managers, and formalize processes for this information to flow, so that they ensure that something is happening for all of those- that's what planning processes and promo packets and the like are all about. They are trying to make the information flow legible- the responsibility of a specific person in a specific way.

[dapperdrake]

Quantitatively this seems to be where Price's law comes in:

The square root of the number of people does half the work. (Think of the matrix diagonal.) With three people in a group, 1.5 of them do half the work. With 10,000 in a group about 100 of them do half the work.

Price's law also seems to be recursive. Just like Pareto's 80/20-rule.

Add Conway’s law to this and you are all set.

[dapperdrake]

Also: About every two orders of magnitude, the whole Geometry of the problem changes.

On the order of 100 people is very different from being on the order of 10,000 people.

There seems to have been an article on HN in the last few months that made a similar point related to building bridges of different lengths. About about every two orders of magnitude everything changed. A one inch bridge could be made out of spaghetti. A 2 yard bridge is different, a two mile bridge is different yet again. And a 100 mile bridge has to think about tectonics.