

Does size matter: at what point does a company lose its edge? - lanej0
http://industryinteractive.net/ideas/does-size-matter/

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run4yourlives
There's a company mentioned in The Tipping Point whose founder surmised that
the opitmum number was around 100. He kept all his locations as self
sufficient entities of no more that 100 people.

The details escape me now, but some other hacker that has read Gladwell will
no doubt fill in the blanks.

~~~
DaniFong
W.L. Gore & associates.

<http://www.gore.com/en_xx/>

The later Roman army was made up of eight (in the early republic, ten)
soldiers per contubernium, which shared a tent and ate together. There were
ten contubernia in a century. These numbers seem awfully familiar.

~~~
run4yourlives
Modern armies share structure that is essentially identical. Section/Squad
(8-10) -> Platoon (30-40) -> Company (100-120)

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demallien
This seems to be pretty much the same thing as the ideological battle of
communism v. capatilism during the 20th century.

Centralised command theoretically allows the avoidance of duplication of
effort, and the sharing of knowledge over an increasingly large problem
domain. The trouble is, as noted in the article and as discovered by the USSR,
no-one has discovered a way to make internal communications sufficiently
efficient to make it work. Large organisations have problems with teams
working at cross-purposes, teams doubling up on effort, and in general just
not benefitting from the fact that somewhere else in the large organisation,
someone has already solved the problem that they are working on.

