
The Gap Between Large and Small Companies Is Growing. Why? - pedrodelfino
https://hbr.org/2019/08/the-gap-between-large-and-small-companies-is-growing-why
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iagovar
I work for a large european behemonth with business all over the world. It's
all you would imagine of an old-style management large company, with an insane
amount of bureaucracy and an uphill battle to make anything productive.

The way to achieve results is based on throwing a lot of money at problems,
trial and error and making employees and customers suffer in the process.

It's a company that has made a lot of stupid decisions (especially ruinous
acquisitions in the past), but good decisions have a huge impact simply
because of a matter of scale. And it seems to work.

As I was saying, internal operations are a disaster, the applications we use
as employees were already the typical corporate application with problems, but
last year someone lit a light bulb, and decided it was time to do it all web,
with CSS and responsive. Now everyone has a beautiful frontend with many
colors and buttons with :hover, but the information structure is so bad and so
unintuitive that employees want to cut their veins and die on the spot.

Most of the operations, say 99%, are outsourced companies that operate with
incentives. This is a constant free for all fight.

Among our competitors there are more agile companies, with lower prices, with
better services, with better customer service, with better defined services,
with clearer internal operations, with corporate applications that make sense,
and so on.

And yet it works.

So what I do is walk calmly to my job. I fight the battles that I think I have
an opportunity and let the others pass. And when my time comes, I walk home,
change my clothes and go to the beach or whatever I want.

