Are.na
Often, we see this brilliance in early versions of products—born from founder-built brute force and passion—only to see it fade with scale. Ultimately, you are only as good as your team, so you better craft it intentionally and with heart. The company becomes your great work. The best designed of these organizations become durable as they scale and... See more
Design Literacy
Things tend to get worse as they scale. As startups turn to large corporations, they empty of meaning. The tight social bonds of a village fail in the big city. What goes wrong?
Joe Edelman • On Planting Fields
What many organizations fail to realize is that complexity scales exponentially with team size. The more people you hire, the more complicated things get. You have to manage more people, your workflows become more complex, and it becomes significantly harder to improve the way people work. If you’re not already operating efficiently, you’re just
Nick Sonnenberg • Come Up for Air: How Teams Can Leverage Systems and Tools to Stop Drowning in Work
The internet and software is only accelerating this trend: as coordination costs get lower, it becomes easier and easier for companies to use outside services instead of building capabilities internally, concentrating knowledge in fewer and fewer organizations.
Ise Jingu and the Pyramid of Enabling Technologies
true innovators value art up front and compete against incumbents through the art of business—the stuff that doesn’t intuitively scale.