Your Organizational Surface Area

Excellent observation from Neil Gershenfeld in When Things Start To Think - -

"I have a theory for why so many companies full of smart people persist in doing so many dumb things.  Each person has some external bandwidth for communicating with other people, and some internal processing power for thinking.  Since these are finite resources, doing more of one ultimately has to come at the expense of the other.  As an organization expands, the volume of people inside the company grows faster than the surface area exposed to the outside world.  This means that more and more of people's time gets tied up in internal message passing, eventually crossing a threshold beyond which no one is able to think, or look around, because they have to answer their e-mail, or write a progress report, or attend a meeting, or review a proposal.  Just like a black hole that traps light inside, the company traps ideas inside organizational boundaries."