I have been thinking a lot recently about the evolution of companies from their founding to their growth and success and ultimately to their becoming just like every other company and their eventual 'deaths.' There is a certain inevitability, it seems, to this pattern. I think about all the great companies I have seen start from nothing, come of age, evolve, blossom and grow. When they reach a certain stage or size, they lose something, the thing that made them great, and that loss leads to their mediocrity and presages their future decline. What is it? Why does this happen? I am sure that many more educated and experienced people have written a lot about this. There must be hundreds of business school case studies about this phenomenon.
Here's my theory based on my own observations. I called it 'death by technocrat.' When a company reaches a certain size, managing the business well becomes difficult and the ad hoc processes and systems created by the entrepreneurs who started the company no longer scale. At that point, "professionals" are brought in. Professional marketers, product management, technologists and the like. There is nothing wrong with these people. They have, through experience in larger businesses and their education, learned a set of patterns of 'best practices' that help overcome the obstacles and inefficiencies from which the new, fast-growing company is suffering. These technocrats help a lot and make it possible for the company to get to the next level. In fact, they can help the new company to achieve even greater levels of success. However, the seeds of the young company's death are sewn when this happens. New processes and procedures based on 'tried-and-true' ways of operating end up obliterating the entrepreneurial spirit and creativity that made the company what it was.
I am sure that there is more to discuss about this phenomenon and its cause. However, I am not really interested in the details of why it happens unless it can help me to understand what can be done to ameliorate the technocrat's impact on the soul of what made the new company great to begin with. What I want to figure out is how to build a permanently evolving, innovating and successful company that retains in its core the unconventional entrepreneurial characteristics I love so much about young, fast-growing companies.
This requires more thought. Much more thought.
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Ah, the professionals. Like Leon the PM.
One thing I realize the more experience I get with Big Co.'s is that at a certain scale, it's not MANAGEment anymore, it's GOVERNment. Running a company of many thousands of people is much more like running a city than like running a smaller company.
If someone wanted to, say, solve the problem of the Seattle Viaduct--an aging but basically functional piece of transportation infrastructure, you'd have to deal with old plumbing, architectural layers no one remembers building, dozens of interest groups (all with three-letter acronyms), competing requirements and rules, unpredictable political support, not to mention the darn customers who keep driving on the thing every day by the millions! That's what big problems at big companies start to seem like.
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