..and according to Seth Godin, it is also the new big. Go read that link, and spend a lot of time on his blog - his writing style is fantastic, cutting the crap, point-blank-in-your-face stuff that makes a lot of sense.
I have always hated big companies - I just think the legalese, bureaucracy and obsession with processes stifles innovation and personality development massively. I could never work for an employer with 2,000 co-workers, let alone one with 20,000. I really like the smaller company culture, where you know everyone's favourite drink and colour, their strengths and weaknesses and what works best with them and you. As Seth so wonderfully puts it, as long as the people in charge can think big, small is really the new big.
I am not knocking the value of processes - heck, a big company could collapse without processes and procedures. The trick for the biggies is to break the company virtually down into logical and smaller entities so that the culture and spirit sorta resembles a smallish company's verve. Some do, some don't - and the ones that don't end up not being so successful. I remember Jack Welch writing about his unending attempts to maintain small-company culture in the behemoth called GE (in the book Straight from the Gut).
Thank god the industry I work for now does not have too many godzilla-sized companies.
Category: Business
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