This is why you may want to work for a SMALLER COMPANY.

Here is why you want to think twice before accepting an offer from a large company.

1) In larger companies decision makers have a tendency to make decisions that benefit themselves or their area and not the company as a whole.

2) Too many layers of management and too many stakeholders - decisions are slow, clarity is low.

3) Clarity: it is often not clear who and what organisation is in control of which decision. There is definitely the broken phone syndrome - the decisions at the top have to be translated several times before they get to the rank and file. Similarly feedback from the rank and file go up through similar translation on the way up.

4) Forbes.com article stated that in large companies decision makers are often too far removed from clients and their own people to have the right data and facts to make good decisions. I could not agree more with them.

5) Problems of reaching a consensus. Try to decide what color the wall should be by a consensus. If you have 3 people, they can arrive at a compromise. Take 10, and you have a mess. You will end up with a wall of too many colors.

6) Things simply take longer, too many cooks in the kitchen, less face-to-face and more electronic communication. Electronic communications carries more opportunities for misunderstanding.

7) Kennedy said that the success has a thousand fathers, and the failure is an orphan. This applies so well to large companies. The practical negative of this is that failures are very important to innovation and progress. Success follows a number of failures, never happens without them.

8) Large companies often take amazingly bad approach to pay rises and promotions. Raises are locked into ranges. A great performer may get 2 percent higher raise though her output may be 10 times higher. Promotions are often doled out to people who are communicators rather than organizers. In some companies, raises are done on a curve. Whats the point of helping someone in the group, if by helping them you can lower your raise ?

9) People who work with each other should be sitting next to each if possible, not on different floors, and in different buildings.

10) Too many meetings and large conference calls !! I will just leave this as is.

11) People who never worked at a large company often do NOT know what CYA stands for, and never heard of the "blame-game" expression either. I am sure they can quickly correct that deficiency when they join a large company.

You can see these problems in evolution of some companies. When they are small they make the right decisions - who to hire, what to build, how to sell. They move fast and innovate rapidly.

Then they grow bigger and bigger. Invariably the levels of management have to be inserted. With that come stakeholders as well, degrees of separation and all the issues mentioned above.

Degree of separation - is the translation layer through which a message has to travel. It is like a router in computer networks.

Furthermore, people in charge of a company that is going through growth get used to one way of working and are unable to constantly change the leadership style that needs to change with every new degree of separation. 

Finally, something needs to be said about risk appetite, or lack of it, that comes with size.

Actually, as the company swings from a risk-prone startup to a risk-averse large company, some people end up living.

So what is the right size ? What is too large ?

I think the degree of separation from the top to the bottom should be no more than 3, ideally less. I equate degrees of separation to the number of management layers.

Now, if you work in a large company, there are lots of ways to mitigate the challenges above. The best way is simply create a carve-out with the right number of degrees of separation. If you can not politically create such a carve out, then you can act as if you are in one. Watch things speed up immediately as you do that..

Large companies that do well actually fragment their organisation into smaller semi-independent units of the right size. Google, Amazon and WPP are best examples of that.

But overall in large companies we tend to get leaders like this one.

Rarely do we get leaders like this one.

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