With intellectual labor; the effectiveness of an org scales roughly logarithmically with the number of people in it. This means 1000 people may only be 2x more effective than 100. And a company of 10,000 people can actually be 25x less effective than 100 companies of 100 people.
Checks out empirically for most "innovative" software products, but scale also enables new kinds of projects. Communication scales logarithmically but infrastructure scales super-linearly. You couldn't build a 5th generation fighter jet with 100 orgs of 100 people.
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Infrastructure scales I agree! But I'm not sure bigger companies have intrinsically superior infrastructure. I've had a lot of success building infrastructure with small teams and healthy cultures that encourage the best to invest in infra for everyone.
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The 5th generation fighter jet example is provocative but also a bit turbulent for me! The aero industry seems to universally feel the f22 and f35 programs were boondoggles. Maybe would have been better with something more distributed?
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Distributed small orgs work best when each one can occupy a niche for which there is a reasonably-sized market. So you could build billion-dollar highrises with small orgs. You need a big org when you're building very large systems made of components for which there is no market.
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Kelly Johnson, the legendary airplane designer, believed in small but effective teams. Of course a team of 100 cannot design a F35. But even within Lockheed Martin his principals of small but effective team are very well respected.https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/who-we-are/business-areas/aeronautics/skunkworks/kelly-14-rules.html …
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Along the lines of Geoffrey West's book (Scale)
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