How much space do I have? I think the skin-in-the-game is very significant as the OP says. In a smaller organisation, you might have a person who does several

How much space do I have? I think the skin-in-the-game is very significant as the OP says. In a smaller organisation, you might have a person who does several things and one of those is HR. The existence and success of the company depends on hiring well so they do their best. Also, the more efficient they can be (sometimes the worse they can be) the quicker they can get back onto other things. In a large corporate, you now have an HR team. There is usually much less feedback on performance and it is easier to blame the org or the market for poor hires. Another issue is that most employees like most people are only average. A few are terrible and a few are excellent. We can be picky in a small company and find that great person with alignment to the vision etc. What about in your team of 10? You aren't going to find 10 great people so you get a whole range and now some are doing much less than 10th of the work of the team so the excellent people are now picking up the slack. Maintaining multiple communication paths is hard and risky. I worked with a Bank where each requirement spec was signed off by about 15 people (compliance, legal, marketing etc.) how complicated is it to make 1 change? Holidays, other priorities, change of staff etc. can make the smallest thing take really long. Ego: Some people simply cannot compromise. If you are the CEO, you might get away with it but what if someone else is throwing their toys out of the pram because e.g. the legal team need your product to look terrible for compliance reasons? Things you should just accept take weeks or months to argue out. Specialism: The head of e.g. marketing should have the final say on all things marketing ideally. But in many large companies, they might have a disagreement with people who might or might not know more about something but vocalise it anyway. This is magnified if you don't really trust your department heads are good at their job. Oh, so many more things. Is there an example out there of a large organisation that does work well or are there just too many variables to make large organisations work period?