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Dignan: Large corporations do not exist; they are interconnected 150-person Dunbar groups

Aaron Dignan · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · Feb 7, 2023 · at 1:16:36

Aaron Dignan, founder of The Ready, explains why large enterprise operating models should be viewed as collections of human-scale groups rather than monolithic corporate cultures.

0:00 / 0:43exact quote · 43.1s
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“I mean, there's no such thing as a big company, really. I think it's the main thing I deal with when Folks ask me about doing this at scale is like, there's no such thing as Apple or Amazon, right? Like that's not actually a real thing. There are groups of. 153 105 hundred people that live their whole lives with each other and just like very rarely interface with other divisions and units and kind of, you know, it's 50 small companies that are just under the same banner with a set of shared principles in a marketplace with each other. But the reality is like day to day, the Dunbar's number phenomenon kind of defines our working lives. And you can work with about 152 150 people. And that's kind of it. And that's your company. That's your culture. That's your environment.”

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