Why size should not be feared in business
“The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work” — — This line from the book “illusions” by Richard bach gives us a very good picture as to why a team of 3–4 people working in a garage somewhere are able to develop and in some cases even take on companies that are 100 or even 1000 times their size.
As humans, we are always fascinated by the size and this comes from the fact that as children we see “big” things around us and somehow these big things always seem to be the ones that have the power to decide what we should do. We live the first 10 years of our lives completely “in awe” of size situation and therefore completely “in complex” when it comes to this particular factor.
This “hangover” of what I call the “size complex” carries forward to almost every aspect of our life. In the beginning, it starts with our wanting to be tall and later on manifests itself in our having “respect” for someone who is tall. This perpetuates in our teens till we reach our 20s.
Now when we start work life then this obsession moves onto our wanting to be a part of something large. So we end up taking jobs in the government or large companies as we believe that their large size will somehow “lessen” our “size complex”. I mean even if we can’t be tall we can at least “work” somewhere that is “tall” (in this case large ) and so feel more “secure”.
This further translates to our fear of starting a new business as we feel that a large company can easily overrun us and when we think of an idea we hear that “money and muscle” is something that you need OR someone tells us that “deep pockets of so and so company” will threaten you.
What these people forget is that end of the day a company or an idea is propagated by the people who “don’t look at what they are doing as work” (the first line of this piece of mine). This non-feeling of work is what leads to obsession in getting something done and that is what creates a successful business. Unfortunately, size hinders this “feeling of not working” and so even a group of 100 people working on something cant be as effective as a team of 2 or even 1 as size has nothing to do with the output when it comes to business innovation or even implementation.
Think about it we define an activity as leisure as we feel that we want to get that “activity” done. If this feeling of leisure can be transported to our work we end up being obsessed with our work and focused on our objectives as we don’t see our work as ‘work”. This is what defines a start-up and is the reason why smaller companies end up dominating areas where large companies may already be around. In nature’s language, this is called evolution and that as we know always favours the fittest (or the hungriest) and never the largest!
