The world is suffering from giganticism. Bigger is considered better and biggest best. We are encouraged to look at the big picture and ignore the small details like, for instance, individual human beings. We all must worship at the iron altar of economy of scale. We are led by the nose to equate huge size with ultimate success.
Global reach is glorified as the inevitable future of trade and business. Multinational companies around the world, a more and more dominant influence in all our lives, aim to swallow all the companies they can in order to ascend the league table in size as if that in itself is a good thing.
Companies merge with other companies to become super-companies for the sake of that objective alone. Like children playing games top executives look to see who can build the biggest sandcastle on the beach. In the case of oil, I early on lost track of the game. Exxon swallowed Mobil and British Petroleum swallowed Amoco and then, I think, Arco and Total took over Elf and Petrofina and I believe once long ago Chevron was in the process of taking over Texaco but I am not sure what happened with that move. One day we will wake up in a world which has one oil company, named Behemoth, and it will be far mightier than any elected government.
But there are at least two developments which plague whale-proportioned organizations: Motivation slackens and involvement diminishes. People for some reason withdraw themselves from deep interest in what is really going on. Some large concerns are better at motivating than others, but in general bigness breeds a feeling of remoteness from the action. To put it crudely, if a big concern is successful and making lots of money the heart-beat of the ordinary employee isn’t going to thud much faster nor does he usually sweat with much agony if the concern happens to be just ticking over or even gradually failing. To get the best out of any man you have to convince him that his personal involvement and his individual contribution really matters and this can best be achieved in small groups. The group in fact has probably got to be very small – not more than about 10 people. It has been pointed out that Jesus Christ tried12 and that proved one too many.
Secondly, in any large organization there seems to be an inexorable tendency towards bureaucracy – too much red tape; too many committee meetings; too much paper and forms and questionnaires and directives and inter-departmental memos and circulating files; too many pettifogging regulations; too many references up and referrals down before decisions are made; too much settling for the lowest common denominator to get any agreement at all. Sad to say, in such an organization – whether it be big private business, big public corporation, or big ministry – even good impulses are ruined in practice. Take the praiseworthy impulse to keep everyone informed about what is going on.
That is basically a good thing, but in a big organisation what tends to happen is that an extraordinary amount of valuable time is spent by executives, managers, and technical people holding countless conferences among themselves just to tell each other what they are all doing with the result that more and more they are all prevented from actually getting on with doing what they are so busy explaining to each other what they are going to do. Large organisations, hoping to remain dynamic, will always have to find innovative ways within themselves to solve these fundamental problems of lack of personal involvement and stultifying bureaucracy.
Mammoth size is best suited to works of aggression, destruction and greedy accumulation – an army fighting a mighty (but not a guerrilla) war, a corporation engineering a take-over, a great country winning a trade negotiation with a poor country. Mammoth size is not suited to creating anything and never indulges in works of the imagination.
One of America’s great founding fathers, James Madison, remarked that “great things” could only be accomplished “in a narrow compass.” He was talking about the most famous constitution of them all, the American Constitution, a document created by four or five individuals seated with pen and ink at a wooden table behind windows sealed with felt. And, as the America commentator, Lewis Lapham, has written, if not within a narrow compass “how else does one raise children, paint the Sistine ceiling, write Middlemarch, find the formula for penicillin? Where else does anybody say or do or make anything that adds to the store of human value and enlarges the vocabularies of human meaning? Ask fifty or a thousand people to make a list of those occasions from which they have taken heart, and it’s fair to guess that most of them would remember a room in which it was possible to talk. The vastness of commercial empire shrivels by comparison with the vortex of immensity gliding swiftly from the words in a book, the lilt of a song, the expression in a boy’s face or a woman’s eyes.”
Poets are much wiser than politicians or businessmen or even engineers and lawyers and accountants, so I will end with a quotation from Edmund Spenser, the English Elizabethan poet. He is the same one, by the way, who spoke for all faithful teachers and nurses in hard-pressed times when he wrote: “And all for love and nothing for reward!” A long time ago Edmund Spenser recognised that small was indeed not only beautiful but also all-important:
How canst thou these greater secrets know
That dost not know the least thing of them all?
Ill can he rule the great, that cannot reach the small.
