I’ve been thinking a lot about corporation size lately. In part because of all the layoffs around a number of big companies right now. In the UK they use the word redundancy, I hate the word redundancy and I don’t understand how organisations can grow without real needs, so how does an organisation get itself to a position where you have redundant roles! It shouldn’t take a recession to force organisations to cut costs organisations should only grow where needed. What we’re seeing now, in so many organisations around the world, is the result of haphazard hiring and growth without clear strategy and not the impact of a downturn. I really believe that organisations are using the economic climate as an excuse for downsizing based on bad decisions.
But how did we get here? How did we move from efficiency to inefficiency of scale? By getting to big too fast in the wrong areas in the wrong way. Too many organisations took too much public money, earned buckets of cash, spent said cash like it was in a burning house, hired too many people, without thinking efficiency.
How do you prevent such a thing from happening? I don’t know, I haven’t created a multi billion dollar organisation (yet, you never know, give me a couple of years). But I do think is that Umair Haque has it right on the Harvard Business Blog when he compared Obama’s campaign to the edge economy and innovation. What I’ve taken out of his post and my reflection on the post is that having a big hairy audacious goal is good – like Obama’s “Yes we can” and “Change the world”, but at the same time you have to keep your execution light, fluid and responsive, something that becomes difficult in a bloated, overstaffed, organisation.
Don’t get me wrong, I feel terrible for people who are being laid off, I have some friends around the world who are scared of losing their jobs, heck I’m scared of losing my job. But more then feeling terrible I’m a bit pissed off at the organisations who grew without a plan, who tried to get bigger, without focusing on getting better. In my opinion, they’re the real culprit behind this not the credit crisis and economic downturn.
