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.

[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...

[tomfakes → spitfire]

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...

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 → tomfakes]

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.