I am amused whenever people talk about the efficiency of corporations, because I see inefficiencies everywhere, and the bigger and more consolidated the company, the worse it is.
A friend of mine left my last employer shortly after I did, but while I've been happy in my new digs, they have not. So they're going back! (They're actually the second former coworker who left and returned, so there's precedent on the team.)
When we were both hired, we were hired by a company with 100-150 employees. A couple of years later, that company was acquired by a company with 600-800 employees. (Somehow the technical leadership of the smaller company ended up as the technical leadership of the combined company, but that's another story.) It was that combined company which we all three left, and to which the other two have returned.
This combined company uses a background-check company, a third party. Apparently for all new hires, even returning hires. Today that company sent my friend an email asking for contact details for a former employer, since they were unable to track them down.
Yeah, *that* former employer. The one with 100-150 employees. The one that was acquired and is now the company that hired the background-check company.
I laughed and laughed. Deep, deep laughter. Oh, the efficiency!
Think of it as efficiencies of scale.
Yes, they exist, but at some point along the curve the efficiencies tend to drop off.
Any large organization will be the same. For a while, getting bigger may become more efficient, but after a point the overhead of managing the beast means growing larger doesn't come with the same increase in efficiency.
The corporate lifecycle is often directly related to getting a fresh start on a company that's overshot that healthy part of the curve.
@volkris @pwinn I'm still thinking that Dunbar's Number tells us what can work, and when groups have a high chance of getting inefficient.