Why We Need to Build Human-Scale Organizations

Why Mega-Scale Organizations Can’t Do Tomorrow’s Work

Image Credit: Freepik

Bigger, bigger, bigger. Better, right? We’ve lionized big, mega, huge-scale — businesses, institutions, organizations — over medium, small, and tiny. So much so, that for example, American legal and economic thought tends to favour the hugest monopolies, the playing field tilted way, way against small-scale organizations, because the idea is that the biggest scale gives people the lowest prices (hence, a nation where Walmart is one of the largest employers, and where every industry is ultra concentrated into monopoly, whether Comcast or Google or Nike.)

Ah, but. That’s not all large-scale organizations give people, is it? They also seem to bring with them a host of problems, too — like mistrust, greed, the replacement of social values with market values, inequality, pollution, conformity, staleness, and a kind of soft authoritarianism, a kind of corrosion of the spirit that results from huge power imbalances (you will do it our way! submit!!).

So. Was privileging mega-scale organizations a wise choice? Or should we strive now to build economies upon what I’ll call human scale institutions? To explain what that means, I’ll start with a little story.

When 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 for wimps, has-beens, wannabes — not swashbuckling masters of the universe. Nope. Build the hugest organization possible. Sell it at the highest price possible. That was the attitude to have.

Only the problem was I didn’t have that attitude at all.