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Culture and Scale
Why small organizations do not have culture in the usual sense, what changes near fifty people, and how founders transmit or fail to transmit a standard.
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01
Culture at a Second Location
A second site develops its own culture within about eighteen months. The question is not whether that happens but whether the small number of things that must not vary actually hold there.
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02
Crossing Fifty
Somewhere between forty and eighty people, informal coordination stops working. The transition arrives without an event, and the usual reading is that the wrong people were hired.
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03
Small Organizations Do Not Have Culture Problems
Below about fifty people, what looks like culture is one person's temperament operating with no counterweight. That is not a criticism; it is a description of the mechanism, and it has consequences.