You weren't Meant to Have a Boss

Yves Smith linked to You weren't Meant to Have a Boss. The gist is that people were not meant to work in large groups. The author has a bias towards small start-up companies for computer programmers. I think the author has misread the growth of large organisations.

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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.

Whatever the upper limit is, we are clearly not meant to work in groups of several hundred. And yet—for reasons having more to do with technology than human nature—a great many people work for companies with hundreds or thousands of employees.

Companies know groups that large wouldn't work, so they divide themselves into units small enough to work together. But to coordinate these they have to introduce something new: bosses.

Emphasis Mine

And yet, these large organisatiosn work reasonably well. They are stable over a long time - some organisations lasting more a century.

The size of the organisation should depend on the size of the task at hand. For example, a farm would have required a dozen people to operate efficiently a century ago, but, today, a single person can operate a larger farm more effectively.

The degree of automation means that smaller organisations can now attempt to do what a large organisation would have been required with a manual division of labour.

Decision making requires someone to make a decision. This can be a person (e.g. a boss) or a committee or everyone. The quickness of decisions depends on the number of people involved.