Notes on scale + quality
“How many things which are good when small get better by becoming bigger? That local restaurant you love can’t scale to millions of users. Do you really want your favourite indie band to aspire to stadium-level fame? People get cheaper books, and an independent bookseller closes its doors to make way for a giant warehouse full of underpaid people w
... See moreWhen I was in grad school, the unstated assumption in most of what we were taught was that the sole point of a business (or any institution, really) was to grow. To grow, grow, grow, to as large a scale as possible. To build an empire, take over the world. My classmates — tycoons in waiting — lapped it up. “Lifestyle businesses”? Nah! Those were fo... See more
umair haque • Why We Need to Build Human-Scale Organizations
As anything scales too effectively – from restaurants and ad agencies to social networks and search engines – the market opens for more non-scalable alternatives. Once Starbucks opens on every block, we crave the artisanal coffee shop. There's the identity piece of it, where we want some degree of distinctiveness. But there's a practical side too: ... See more
Sari Azout • Notes on Scale + Quality
