You Weren’t Meant to Have a Boss

If a workplace cubicle is a cage, then working for a large company must be like being an animal in a zoo…

What’s so unnatural about working for a big company? The root of the problem is that humans weren’t meant to work in such large groups. Another thing you notice when you see animals in the wild is that each species thrives in groups of a certain size. A herd of impalas might have 100 adults; baboons maybe 20; lions rarely 10. Humans also seem designed to work in groups, and what I’ve read about hunter-gatherers accords with research on organizations and my own experience to suggest roughly what the ideal size is: groups of 8 work well; by 20 they’re getting hard to manage; and a group of 50 is really unwieldy.

Eight as an optimum number seems about right, after that the left hand seems to have ever less idea what the right hand is doing. And once a company is at the point it needs a call centre then there’s no hope for anyone.