The Future of Management by Bill Breen, Gary Hamel

Your highlight at location 205

Consider: in 1890 the average company in the United States had four employees, and few had more than a couple of hundred workers. Had you been alive at the time, it would have been hard to imagine that a company could ever grow to the scale of U.S. Steel, which, after its acquisition of Carnegie Steel in 1901, became the world’s first company with a billion-dollar market value. It would have been nearly impossible to believe that a business founded in 1903-the Ford Motor Company-would be turning out more than half a million cars per year a decade later. And it would have been equally hard to foresee all of the underlying management breakthroughs that would come together to make all this possible.

Average company had just 4 employees?!? Wow, I still see a revival of sorts companies wanted to ‘feel’ like this: agile, transparent, trustworthy. Companies shouldn’t be too big to fail and employees shouldn’t be too small in these companies to not be heard.