The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,68

he was one of the top executives. But his office wasn’t any bigger than anyone else’s. His card just called him an “associate.” He didn’t seem to have a secretary, one that I could see anyway. He wasn’t dressed any differently from anyone else, and when I kept asking the question again and again, all he finally said, with a big grin, was, “I’m a meddler.”

Gore is, in short, a very unusual company with a clear and well articulated philosophy. It is a big established company attempting to behave like a small entrepreneurial start up. By all accounts, that attempt has been wildly successful. Whenever business experts make lists of the best American companies to work for, or whenever consultants give speeches on the best managed American companies, Gore is on the list. It has a rate of employee turnover that is about a third the industry average. It has been profitable for thirty five consecutive years and has growth rates and an innovative, high profit product line that is the envy of the industry. Gore has managed to create a small company ethos so infectious and sticky that it has survived their growth into a billion dollar company with thousands of employees. And how did they do that? By (among other things) adhering to the Rule of 150.

Wilbert “Bill” Gore—the late founder of the company—was no more influenced, of course, by the ideas of Robin Dunbar than the Hutterites were. Like them, he seems to have stumbled on the principle by trial and error. “We found again and again that things get clumsy at a hundred and fifty,” he told an interviewer some years ago, so 150 employees per plant became the company goal. In the electronics division of the company, that means that no plant was built larger than 50,000 square feet, since there was almost no way to put many more than 150 people in a building that size. “People used to ask me, how do you do your long term planning,” Hen said. “And I’d say, that’s easy, we put a hundred and fifty parking spaces in the lot, and when people start parking on the grass, we know it’s time to build a new plant.” That new plant doesn’t have to be far away. In Gore’s home state of Delaware, for instance, the company has three plants within sight of each other. In fact, the company has fifteen plants within a twelve mile radius in Delaware and Maryland. The buildings only have to be distinct enough to allow for an individual culture in each. “We’ve found that a parking lot is a big gap between buildings,” one longtime associate, Burt Chase, told me. “You’ve got to pick yourself up and walk across the lot, and that’s a big effort. That’s almost as much effort as it takes to get in your car and drive five miles. There’s a lot of independence in just having a separate building.” As Gore has grown in recent years, the company has undergone an almost constant process of division and redivision. Other companies would just keep adding additions to the main plant, or extend a production line, or double shifts. Gore tries to split up groups into smaller and smaller pieces. When I visited Gore, for example, they had just divided their Gore Tex apparel business into two groups, in order to get under the 150 limit. The more fashion oriented consumer business of boots and backpacks and hiking gear was going off on its own, leaving behind the institutional business that makes Gore Tex uniforms for firefighters and soldiers.

It’s not hard to see the connection between this kind of organizational structure and the unusual, free form management style of Gore. The kind of bond that Dunbar describes in small groups is essentially a kind of peer pressure: it’s knowing people well enough that what they think of you matters. He said, remember, that the company is the basic unit of military organization because, in a group under 150, “orders can be implemented and unruly behavior controlled on the basis of personal loyalties and direct man to man contacts.” That’s what Bill Gross was saying about his Hutterite community as well. The fissures they see in Hutterite colonies that grow too big are the fissures that result when the bonds among some commune members begin to weaken. Gore doesn’t need formal management structures in its small plants—it doesn’t need the usual layers of middle and upper management—because in groups that