[unholyguy001]

Yeah exactly. 200 is still a level where everyone knows everyone in their team and all the leaders know each other personally.

I mean spending a lot of time aligning with other leaders. How many director + leaders can there be? Five?

Similarly how heavyweight can the planning and performance process be when you are that small?

[icedchai]

You’d be surprised how many layers there can be even in a small org.

[Aurornis]

Oh I know it happens, but that doesn't make it good.

The only way to get a lot of layers in a small org (200 people) is to have very low fan-out, which is inefficient.

For simplicity, imagine a company with 4 C-level executives at the top. Each of them manages 4 reports, and each of their reports manages 4 people, and so on down the layers. In this simplified example you could have 340 people in a company and still only have 4 layers of management (4 + 16 + 64 + 256).

You could even get the 4 C-level executives and their 16 top-level reports into a single room every week if you had to.

The company in this blog post has almost half as many people (according to parent comment) yet the bureaucracy described within sounds like they have layer upon layer of removal to the point that it's a full-time job for many people just to move information around.

The only times I've seen this happen have been when executives get too focused on 1:1 communication and like to fill their calendars up with recurring meetings with fixed sets of participants. The 1:1 communication turns into a slow game of telephone and the recurring meetings consume all of their time with talk that feels like "work" but could have been replaced with a lot of as-needed e-mails and targeted meetings organized on demand.