Have you noticed how things get more complicated as more people are involved in something? If you alone plan a birthday party, it’s easy to see who makes the decisions and who does the work. Plan a Grateful 7 party with the help of others for a group of 100 (as I did last year to thank everyone for getting me to 7 decades) and it gets much more complicated with others weighing in on how it should go. The different planners have different ideas and the work has to be distributed in some fashion. And the distribution is never equal or fair according to anyone involved. Sound familiar?
In my book “Accelerating Start to Finish” I have a chart that compares revenue, the number of people involved, and highlights the management needed based on comparison to what the military does. I benchmarked numbers from a small, private manufacturing company. Were I to update the book, I would have higher sales per person and show multiple lines for software as a service companies with upwards of $1 million in sales per person. Note the X axis is number of people and I’ve highlighted my understanding of how many people different ranks in the Army command.
This growing complexity, chaos and entropy, reminds me of the second law of thermodynamics that explains “for any spontaneous process, the total entropy (a measure of disorder) of a system and its surroundings will always increase.” That’s a quote from an artificial intelligence large language model (Google GEMINI). Unless you apply an outside force, entropy and disorder always grow.
Consider a home with young children with energy, imagination, and a box full of toys. My wife always made sure our kids put everything away each night. By the middle of the next day, it was pure chaos in the family room and you had to watch where you stepped to avoid twisting an ankle or breaking some toy that would result in shrieks and tears.
It would be nice if business were so much more sane and easy to deal with. Alas, entropy and chaos reign there as well unless energy is applied to channel things in the right way.
Recently I have learned about the Stages of Growth” from the @ReWild Group based on research with small and mid-sized companies. Below is just one sample of the growth framework showing the stage based on the number of people involved and the needed number of managers and executives.
To link back to the first chart, I’ve taken some recent material from the Army’s website and shown the titles of the leaders and “executives” involved.
Before you jump to any conclusions, consider that counting the number of people in an organization or that you are responsible for is a bit more complicated today. Today we manage outside contractors, part time employees, fractional leaders, board members, advisors, key suppliers. More complexity and chaos that needs to be considered.
Take a few moments to figure out what stage of growth you are in by working through this simple exercise at: https://www.rewildgroup.com/step-1-calculator and/or let’s talk https://calendly.com/paul-ba
Just for fun, if you work with a larger corporation, here are the next two titles.
