A Company is like a Sphere
Where do these great analogy ideas come from? Full credit - I got this
one from a speaker at the
SAP Research Center
in Palo Alto, last spring.
A company is like a sphere.
As it grows, volume increases much faster than surface area, and the
large a company gets, way more people get embedded and hidden from the
end customer than are on the fringe, in customer-facing roles.
As a general rule, this is a bad thing. Well, maybe a less-than-optimal
thing - what percentage of your corporate attention span is
customer-focused?
Our Challenge is to poke some pockets into the surface, and get more
surface area exposed to the outside air.
- Will this help a company go farther? It seems to work for golf balls ...
- Will this make the company more human? Perhaps, in a
self-fulfilling / reverse fractal kind of way ...
- Will rough edges generate incremental profit? Some counterintuitive friction ...