Small is good?
I’ve recently seen a lot of posts on Signal vs. Noise concerning the value of being a small company. They especially point out that small companies have the ability to get a personal relationship to their customers. Another point is that people need to stay on top of their game in small companies, otherwise they will be noticed for their lazyness.
The latter point got me thinking about the curriculum of the first few years of university. Mintzberg wrote about how most companies, when they start out being small, have an adhoc type of structure. Mintzberg suggested that for creative and innovative companies, the adhocracy was the most suitable. When small companies with an adhocracy try to grow, they move away from the adhocracy towards a new form of structure with more formalization and support staff – mostly into professional bureaucracies (fagbureaukrati in Danish). This change in structure would then be counterproductive for innovation and creativeness, as sharing of knowledge and working together would get more problematic.
So there you go 37 Signals – a good argument for staying small.
Innovation and creativeness are easier in small companies, but is it really that hard in large companies? Is growth possible for a small company if they want to keep their innovative abilities intact? Is it possible for a group of innovative workers remain to creative and autonomous in a larger company while still being controlled?
A possible solution to the problem could be to keep spinning off new autonoumous business units that act as individual companies? So a bunch of small companies instead of one big. Or maybe the solution is just to remain small? – at least in the minds of the customers.