What works for small companies is not what works for large companies. I should know. I was employed in 1996 at a small company in Northern Virginia, and they hired a big corporate high-flyer to help them fix their company. This was a disastrous decision; and the company suffered a lot from taking his advice. The reason is that what works for large companies is not what works for small companies. Large companies tend to have a stable work load, whereas small companies have high demand at some times and low demand at other times. What works for small companies is therefore not what works for large companies; and the more people understand this the better will be their business practices. I have worked for both small companies and large companies, and I've seen viable business practices in both. The best practice I have seen on the part of the small companies was employers building personal friendships with their employees. This motivates the employees to be personally loyal to the company and to go beyond the call of duty to do work for them. With large companies, in which the boss cannot form friendships with all his employees, the best practice I've seen was done by Oracle Corporation. They involved people at all levels in the decision-making process, which gave people a sense of meaning and purpose and got them to work hard for the benefit of the company knowing that they were making a meaningful contribution. Both small companies and large companies are capable of both rightful and wrongful directions. There are things that work for both of them, and they are not the same. The more people understand this the better will be their business practices, the better will be the companies large or small of which they are a part.
I’d suggest there is just as much risk from a simplistic division in to “small” and “large”. There is clearly a wide range of company sizes, a number of different ways of measuring a company size and major differences across different industries and regions. I’d suggest that treating all “small” companies the same and all “large” companies the same would be no better than not even making that distinction at all. Individual attention needs to be individual to that company while general policy needs to recognise the general variety and diversity it’s addressing.
