29 ms·
On being the right size (1928)
- mildweed 13y agoRelate this to Dunbar's Number and an effective small business. Dunbar says 150 total for a social group. But we operate across multiple social groups, across all realms of life, not just your job. If you wanted to put together an elite group of excellent professionals, how big do you suspect that could be? In other words, how large should you let your company get before you spit it down the middle into two subsidiaries? My guess: 125 125 = 150 - (5 close family + 5 extended family + 4 close friends + 6 extended friends + 5 extracurricular friends)
- xxchan 13y agoI don't know if I'm ok with using 83% (125/150) of all my Monkeysphere slots on "work".
- ordinary 13y agoDunbar's number is the number of people in a group in which every individual knows every other individual personally. This is not the same as the number of people an individual can know personally. The way you can split a company in two is identical to the way our brains already distinguish between social groups. I don't need to remember that John from work doesn't know Mary from the bridge club, only that there is no overlap between the two groups. Another problem with the maximum company size that you propose is that Dunbar's number is not a hard limit of 150, it depends on the conditions under which such a group forms and operates. The Wikipedia article on it is, as so often, a good primer.
- pndmnm 13y agoIf you find this article interesting, it's also worth finding and flipping through D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's classic "On Growth and Form". A copy is available at the Internet Archive: http://archive.org/details/ongrowthform00thom http://archive.org/details/ongrowthform00thom
- _delirium 13y agoBackground on the author: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._B._S._Haldane http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._B._S._Haldane
- curiouslurker 13y agoSame goes for so called 'lifestyle businesses'. I have heard it said that you can run a life style business till about $1 million per year in revenue before you need the systems and processes that only make sense for a $10 million per year business.
- nn3 13y agoAs opposed to the maximum size I find it more interesting what the minimum size of organisations is (Haldane's example was the mouse's eye): Can you write viable software with a small team (<5)? Yes Can you write very complex software like a distributed database or a web browser with a small team (<20)? Maybe, but will already be very difficult for the web browser (assuming not just writing a WebKit wrapper) Can you develop a CPU with a small team (<10people)? Depends on the complexity, but typically CPU teams are larger for more faster chips. Can you develop the silicon process needed to make the CPU with a small team? (<100) No
- tracker1 13y agoIn all of your examples, it depends on the team, their skill level as individuals and how well they communicate... the large the extended teams that have to coordinate, the larger a part communication takes, and the less time each member of a team has to accomplish any work. In software, I've seen this time and again. Adding more people to a team is sometimes a very bad thing.
- flycaliguy 13y agoSo, horse sized duck then?
- xerophtye 13y agoAs amazing as the article is, i have one confusion. What about dinosaurs? In the eagle part, he said eagles CAN'T be as big as tigers etc. But what about Pterodactyls? How did they manage to be so big? Oh and weren't all the dinosaurs cold-blooded? So, if I am not mistaken, didn't the author say that we get over the problem of heat loss by being warm-blooded? Or does that just mean that they had to eat ALOT more? (though i suppose due to frequent volcanic eruptions etc maybe the environment was hot enough to sustain them)
- jhart3333 13y agoDinosaurs were not cold blooded as it turns out. They live on today as birds.
- xvedejas 13y agoWe don't actually know that. And part of the reason is "dinosaurs" is such a broad term, encompassing so many species of many millions of years. I would think it's mostly likely that some dinosaurs were cold-blooded and some warm-blooded. I have also attended a talk that suggested that some dinosaurs almost certainly didn't fit the warm-blooded or cold-blooded model, and that despite mechanically being cold-blooded, their large size alone kept them warm. So in many ways those ones were practically warm-blooded.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- tbrake 13y agoPterodactyls were small. They had roughly the same wingspan as the modern bald eagle.
- sejje 13y agoMaybe if bald eagles had 36-foot wingspans: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetzalcoatlus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetzalcoatlus
- n1ghtm4n 13y ago"[God has] an inordinate fondness for beetles" -- favorite J.B.S. Haldane quote. About 1/4 of all known animal species are beetles.
- breakyerself 13y agoThis is really an argument against socialism as the communists tried to implement it. Where the state nationalizes every industry and all workers become employed by the state which plans everything centrally. Most socialists have moved beyond that model and would instead prefer to see a system of enterprise that uses co-op's instead of privately or publicly owned business. Some industries would probably be nationalized or socialized, but not much more than already is in the best parts of Europe. The main idea is to make the enterprises benefit those who do the actual work and also make them accountable to those people and their communities. The main problem with capitalism is that someone other than the people doing the work get to decide how the work is done and how to spend the surplus of value that work generates. If the workers decided these things they would never vote to outsource their own jobs and would rarely choose to pollute their own communities. They wouldn't vote to reward a tiny minority with a fortune while they pay themselves poverty wages.
- dantheman 13y agoJobs would still move, it's just that an industry in another country owned by someone else would eventually take the business. That is unless the local industry was somehow able to ban foreign competition. The beauty of capitalism is that it roots out inefficiency. If you take a look at history, state controlled enterprises are the most polluting.
- briandear 13y agoExactly. Spend some time in the foreign Soviet Bloc and this is crystal clear.
- ljf 13y agoYou don't have to ban foreign competition, it just has to be an informed choice. Why is company x cheaper, what can we do to emulate them (do we want to?). Although we might have higher costs buying locally what other benefits do we have?
- gnarbarian 13y ago
- tlo 13y agotl;dr http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Being_the_Right_Size http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Being_the_Right_Size
- nephorider 13y agothe "biological part" in the article is good and seems to be factual. The political conclusion looks however more"cut and paste there".
- tehwalrus 13y agoThe author was an evolutionary biologist who happened to be a Marxist. Apparently, like Ralph Milliband, one of those Marxists who didn't like Russian communism! See the other comments for a link to his wikipedia page.
- bcoates 13y agoA decade later, Coase worked out the economic argument in much more detail in "The Nature of the Firm". (The logic works the same for business enterprises in a market economy as it does for nation- or world-sized Communist economies) http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0335.1937.tb00002.x/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0335.1937....
- nephorider 13y agothe "biological part" in the article is good and seems to be factual. The political conclusion looks however more"cut and paste there".
- 6ren 13y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm
- fcatalan 13y agoA great post about the same problem but from a Math/CS perspective, and as fun to read: http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/918.html http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/918.html [Cosma Shalizi's "In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You]
- pja 13y agoRed Plenty was such a good book. Highly recommended.
- veganarchocap 13y agoMarxists.org? Really?
- drjesusphd 13y agoThis smells like ad hominem.
- veganarchocap 13y agoIt's not ad hominem, it's just that Hacker News is often so (quite rightly, in my view) focused on growth of private industry and tech start-ups. It seems bizarre a Marxist forum crops up, with seemingly swarms of support.
- drjesusphd 13y agoI don't see "swarms of support". I see informed debate and discussion, which is a breath of fresh air compared to the knee-jerk reactionism usually associated with the topic. And it's the same kind of reactionism that you're illustrating all too perfectly.
- cstross 13y agoThere seems to be a chunk missing in the third paragraph: Or it can compress its body and stretch out its [???] these two beasts because they happen to belong to the same order as the gazelle
- Flenser 13y ago" legs obliquely to gain stability, like the giraffe. I mention " https://www.marxists.org/archive/haldane/works/1920s/right-size.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/haldane/works/1920s/right-s... There are no other differences with that version.
- forkandwait 13y agoThe Hutterites have been living communally for about 400 years (I think), and have evolved an ideal size for a "colony" of about 90 people. At about 110 they start getting ready to "hive off". Colonies have been very successful, often pissing off the less organized (and less successful) locals. http://www.hutterites.org/day-to-day/structure/ http://www.hutterites.org/day-to-day/structure/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutterite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutterite While similar in ways to Amish, Hutterites rather like new technology and put it to good use on their farms.
- pron 13y agoAnother interesting read is the rise and fall of the Kibbutz, possibly the most famous form of a commune. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz