Organization Trumps Individuals

It is evident that, regardless of ability, an individual or loose collection of individuals will not prevail against the efforts of an organized group.

Clarification: not all organized groups are companies/corporations.

The efforts of the individuals in the group may not be as efficient or as competently rendered individually, but focused by leadership and management they can still trump the efforts of the individual(s).

This has another aspect that I didn't fully appreciate until I went into freelance consulting. Organizations prefer to contract their projects to other organizations rather than individuals or loose collections of them.

I found that, among other things, I had no acceptable answer to the completely predictable question, "if you can do this in six months, can you put another couple of guys on it and have it done in three months?" It didn't matter that in reality I could beat the quality, delivery dates, and costs of any organization they hired, they had TruckNumber fears and were willing to spend more for inferior work and slipped deadlines in exchange for the "SecurityOfDepth" provided by an organization.

-- GarryHamilton

Warning: rambling discussion follows.

In reflecting further on this, I find that size of organization is less important than effectiveness of organization. Size can be important in a DeepPockets? fashion when one organization attempts either to undercut the pricing of a competitor beyond the ability of that competitor to absorb the sales losses or to sue the competition beyond their ability to pay their lawyers.

Beyond simply using size as a crushing weapon, size usually works against an organization, unless that organization is well structured and well trained, and modernly this is pretty much not a problem, as corporations are run by people who, by and large, are not there to assure the longevity and ultimate survival of the company but rather to line their pockets. Since "enriching the CEO" is almost always at odds with "long-term thriving company" the larger organizations have built-in dissonance that hampers their effectiveness, allowing smaller, more agile companies to outflank them.

Sometimes the only way to beat such an agile company is to buy them (e.g. Fox Software, which was a small, agile company, staffed by gifted, committed talent, got bought by Microsoft, which was effectively the end of the collective genius; the resulting NewImproved? product -- VisualFoxPro -- shows little of the brilliance that once defined the product).

All of this having been said, an organization, by and large, will still win out over an individual or loose collection of them. Individuals mostly can't take advantage of DivisionOfLabor and they need sleep. Occasionally an individual will invent a KillerProduct? but, unless some kind of organization is quickly established, it's hard to sustain production while continuing to invent what's next.

There is another context where the individual comes off badly: when the individual is actually part of an organization but the organization's (or executives') objectives are attained only a great cost to the individual(s). A not uncommon result of this is the creation of yet another organization to stand against the primary organization to achieve, collectively, what individuals cannot. Now you have even more dissonance. Ultimately, collective action against the company is not the answer.

So organizations can be compromised by the simple fact of the executives having goals at cross purposes to the company.

Okay, so that illustrates why Company A can get its butt kicked by smaller Company B. But what does that do for the poor Company A employee whose life sucks by virtue of misguided executives? Not a lot.

However ... (yeah, you knew there was a "however") ... a person can seek out other such persons and concoct among them a quiet conspiracy to make and sell something of value and, when the moment is right, quit the larger organization(s) and strike out on their own. Occasionally a single individual can craft a remunerative activity by himself and break away (I've been studying such an individual for more than 3 years to understand this better).

Where does that leave us? Well, if what you do has to compete to succeed, then you need some kind of organization. Somehow you have to keep the organization small enough to keep focus or you have to learn organizational technology better than any of your competitors and make sure you don't mimic their internal problems by adopting their structure or methods. The alternative is to be prepared to sell out and retire when your success attracts the attention of the corporate heffalump. As an individual solution that's probably not too bad, but you can't pass that on to your kids.

Myself? I'm planning to emulate the success of an individual who peeled off from a company that undervalued his skills and who is working mostly alone and earning triple what Company A was paying. The only thing I think needs to change is the personal time requirement: my friend can't really take a vacation.

-- GarryHamilton

Another look at the organization/individual thing is at WhenTheFormulaChangesFromMakingMoneyToLosingMoney.