

How to balance being nimble with being productive? Scaling a company. - templaedhel

Now it seems to be a general consensus that working the at a small nimble company with a startup atmosphere is "our" ideal working environment. Its the environment that promotes our creativity, and allows us to work with the least amount of useless bureaucracy. If you disagree or have different preferences, please share. However, all companies want to grow up as well. It seems to be another general consensus that large unwieldy companies are not as good a place to work for conditions are opposite as mentioned above (see microsoft, google, yahoo etc). So how do you balance this? How can you balance this in a business? At some point you need more employees, but once you get too big, you become unwieldy. Its a paradox.
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spitfire
Many companies find ways to stay small. Take Lego for example. Making little
plastic blocks is a pretty trivial thing, something that can be outsourced. So
they have. Lego is now an IP/creative company with production of coloured
blocks outsourced.

Or take vans aircraft, a small company that's been around 30 successful years.
Or look at any number of small ISV's that's been around for ages. All it takes
is willpower.

Interview with lego ceo: [http://www.monocle.com/sections/business/Web-
Articles/QA-wit...](http://www.monocle.com/sections/business/Web-Articles/QA-
with-the-CEO-of-Lego/)

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tomfakes
But it turns out that making cheap plastic bricks is quite hard to do right.
Lego's outsourcing failed and they pulled it back in-house:
[http://www.evolvingexcellence.com/blog/2009/03/legos-
newfoun...](http://www.evolvingexcellence.com/blog/2009/03/legos-newfound-
love-of-insourcing.html)

I think you have to decide: Is this important? If it is, find a way to do it
right. If it isn't, kill it.

 _You_ have to decided what to kill. This sounds easy, but is quite hard to do
when looking at it from the inside. Its easy to be distracted by shiny things.

~~~
spitfire
Well, the point really was that they've stayed small. One of the worlds most
recognized brands is under 1500 employees. and has worldwide reach that even 2
year olds know.

