I was at an event recently where someone talked about a book they were going to write with advice on how to make big companies work more effectively. Testament to the popularity of this topic are the almost unlimited number of books on the subject. And I believe that his book would add even more insight to the field. So what’s the problem?

Maybe there are no tactics, no novel management techniques, no new systems, that can ever really make a big company a truly great environment because the problem is not in execution — it’s in conception. Maybe, just maybe, large companies are fundamentally flawed, and no number of band-aids, management seminars, and well-meaning (and even well-written) books, can fix them.

To be fair, (not counting my time as a supermarket drone in high school, and a secretary at a major university hospital briefly after college) I’ve only worked at one company that would really be considered large (over 100 people). And this particular company numbers in the tens of thousands. And, in fact, I remember when I first arrived that this big company had much less bureaucracy than some of the startups I had worked at. Seriously. Was that a band-aid in place? Or am I wrong about big companies?

There are big companies that can get going in an unstoppable groove and everything clicks. Everything works. Everyone’s feeling good, making great things, and making customers happy. And yet, it feels like these big groups are on a binge/starve roller coaster as they inevitably dip and employees and customers get disaffected. This must happen at small companies too right? I know it did at small ones that I’ve worked at. So really what’s the difference?

I think you can have greatness at small companies and at big companies. I genuinely do. To me, as hard as it is to achieve greatness (for employees and customers), what’s key is to make that healthy environment something that is a default state. It’s not good enough in my opinion to periodically reach greatness. My goal (definitely not achieved as of yet) is to engineer an organization that is always in a state of stable and healthy greatness. This doesn’t mean that sales never go down. This doesn’t mean that every day is sunshine and ice cream sundaes. This does mean that the environment you create is on average consistently positive and healthy — in effect, resilient to those ups and downs.

The theory I’ll float, is that I wonder if it isn’t impossible to achieve this as a default state in a large company relative to a small company where it’s merely very unlikely.

Umair Haque captures the mood:

“Yes, big business sucks. We all know it. But the question is: what does our feeling really mean? Why do we feel that?

Because the DNA of the industrial era firm is sucking the life out of the economy. Once upon a time, industrial era firms were engines of value creation. Today, they’re prisons, where trauma is institutionalized into everyone who comes into contact with them.

That feeling – like a dull toothache – is a massively powerful heuristic that something is deeply wrong; wrong with McJobs; wrong with $100m bonuses for value destruction; wrong with the evisceration of variety, choice, and happiness; wrong with the long slow death of culture and community; wrong with the sinking intuition that like you’ve signed away your life when you walk into that cube, all for a few bucks and free lattes.”

Of course, do you think the folks at Facebook (are they still the current darling big company?) feel the way Umair describes above? Probably not. Or at least, not yet. It’s inevitable… right? Yesterday Google was the “it” place. Wasn’t it? And there are still mainstream media outlets writing that story. And likely, there are still an overwhelming majority of Googlers who are having a grand old time. But what about complaining? Like this:

“Google doesn’t tell you when you’re going through their intense and selective recruiting process that your job is going to be crap.”

Sure… it’s easy to dismiss. 1) It’s on Valleywag which likes to stir things up, and 2) there’s no validation that the commenters are actually Googlers or that they’re telling the truth about anything. But it’s likely that some of these people are actually Googlers and are actually telling the truth from their perspective. And of course, as even the happiest of Googlers would readily admit, it’s natural (and almost impossible not) to find people who are loudly unhappy at a company Google’s size. And this is fundamentally the point. Maybe companies that size, with all their advantages of scale and resources have a fundamental handicap?

Wired recently points out that Apple, who definitely appears to be kicking ass in the making customers happy department right now, is run in a very autocratic and (what many would consider an) unhealthy way.

“Robert Sutton’s 2007 book, The No Asshole Rule, spoke out against workplace tyrants but made an exception for Jobs: “He inspires astounding effort and creativity from his people,” Sutton wrote. A Silicon Valley insider once told Sutton that he had seen Jobs demean many people and make some of them cry. But, the insider added, “He was almost always right.”

“Steve proves that it’s OK to be an asshole,” says Guy Kawasaki, Apple’s former chief evangelist. “I can’t relate to the way he does things, but it’s not his problem. It’s mine. He just has a different OS.””

Does working in a large group require that the boss be an autocratic asshole in order to get greatness from the group? As a friend of mine pointed out, “it’s fine to have an asshole at the company as long as there’s only one. When you have multiples they invariably end up wasting a huge amount of time fighting each other.”

Paul Graham (as he often does) jumps to the salient point:

“What’s so unnatural about working for a big company? The root of the problem is that humans weren’t meant to work in such large groups.”

As my father points out, this type of reaction to big business is cyclical. He eagerly reminds me of the culture of the 60’s where legions of young people railed against large businesses. I was too young in the 60’s to remember it personally, but my sense is that there was in many ways a reaction not only against big business, but against money in general. I think that the counter-culturalism of the 1960’s is much closer to the values of today’s WTO protesters than the anti-“big” energy of startup folks. When I go to a startup or tech community event I see a lot of people who have that same hippie spirit, an religious passion, and a sense of purpose and idealism. However, most of these folks are eager to make money. I don’t think it’s that they’re obsessed with money, but the structure of business is an attractive way for them to express their idealism.

I wonder which groups from history resemble today’s anti-“big”, startup folks the most?

And more importantly, even if big companies are fundamentally flawed in terms of getting to a default state of greatness (which is of course just speculation on my part), there’s still a ton to learn from them as when they deliver, they deliver big. For me personally, I’ve learned lots from the big and now I’ll stick with the small… it seems like a relatively easier problem to solve. And even so, the challenge is monumental.