[idbfs]

10/Fifth: More people multiplies communication overhead exponentially, slows everything down. Company bogs down, becomes bad place to work.

Warning: pedantic.

Adding people increases communication overhead quadratically, not exponentially. To see why, consider the complete graph on n vertices (people), K_n. The number of edges (lines of communication) in K_n is n(n-1)/2, i.e., proportional to n^2.

[dragonwriter]

This assumes that "communication overhead" is proportional to the number of dyads; I can certainly see why one might suspect that to be the case, but I certainly don't see that it is implausible that that overhead would expand faster than that (I don't see an obvious theoretical foundation for literally "exponential" growth, but I wouldn't reject it out of hand, either. Of course, you'd probably want a clearer operationalizations of "overhead" to answer that question.)