On being the right size (1928)
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On being the right size (1928)
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Re: On being the right size (1928)
#2Relate this to Dunbar's Number and an effective small business. Dunbar says 150 total for a social group. But we operate across multiple social groups, across all realms of life, not just your job.
If you wanted to put together an elite group of excellent professionals, how big do you suspect that could be? In other words, how large should you let your company get before you spit it down the middle into two subsidiaries? My guess: 125
125 = 150 - (5 close family + 5 extended family + 4 close friends + 6 extended friends + 5 extracurricular friends)
Re: On being the right size (1928)
#3If you find this article interesting, it's also worth finding and flipping through D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's classic "On Growth and Form". A copy is available at the Internet Archive: http://archive.org/details/ongrowthform00thom
Re: On being the right size (1928)
#4Background on the author: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._B._S._Haldane
Re: On being the right size (1928)
#5Same goes for so called 'lifestyle businesses'. I have heard it said that you can run a life style business till about $1 million per year in revenue before you need the systems and processes that only make sense for a $10 million per year business.
Re: On being the right size (1928)
#6As opposed to the maximum size I find it more interesting what the minimum size of organisations is (Haldane's example was the mouse's eye):
Can you write viable software with a small team (Can you write very complex software like a distributed database or a web browser with a small team (Can you develop a CPU with a small team (Can you develop the silicon process needed to make the CPU with a small team? (<100) No
Re: On being the right size (1928)
#7So, horse sized duck then?
Re: On being the right size (1928)
#8As amazing as the article is, i have one confusion. What about dinosaurs?
In the eagle part, he said eagles CAN'T be as big as tigers etc. But what about Pterodactyls? How did they manage to be so big?
Oh and weren't all the dinosaurs cold-blooded? So, if I am not mistaken, didn't the author say that we get over the problem of heat loss by being warm-blooded? Or does that just mean that they had to eat ALOT more? (though i suppose due to frequent volcanic eruptions etc maybe the environment was hot enough to sustain them)
Re: On being the right size (1928)
#9"[God has] an inordinate fondness for beetles" -- favorite J.B.S. Haldane quote. About 1/4 of all known animal species are beetles.
Re: On being the right size (1928)
#10As amazing as the article is, i have one confusion. What about dinosaurs? In the eagle part, he said eagles CAN'T be as big as tigers etc. But what about Pterodactyls? How did they manage to be so big? Oh and weren't all the dinosaurs cold-blooded? So, if I am not mistaken, didn't the author say that we get over the problem of heat loss by being warm-blooded? Or does that just mean that they had to eat ALOT more? (th…
Dinosaurs were not cold blooded as it turns out. They live on today as birds.