Luke Johnson has a great column in the FT – written from experience – on why large companies are more prone to infighting and less enjoyable places to work.
He writes:
It is a curious aspect of human existence that tribes of people reserve their greatest hatred not for a truly foreign foe, living a great distance away. No – the nastiest contests are with your immediate neighbour, the bully at school or at work you really detest. You are likely to experience more of that in a big company than a smaller, founder-owned one. So one compelling reason why entrepreneurs win is that they are more efficient, wasting less energy on office politics.
I don’t argue with this as a generalisation but he skates over one of the interesting issues about companies – that they have distinctive cultures which are often little to do with size or even the industry they are in. Some are co-operative while others are riven with conflict and intrigue.
Big companies have to work hard to imbue a co-operative culture and not to reward divisive behaviour, and this is one of managers’ trickiest tasks. Being open and collaborative places makes them not only pleasant places to work, but often more productive.
Before it entered its current travails Goldman Sachs was widely – and I think correctly – admired by rivals on Wall Street for having a partnership culture rather than the every-person-for-himself approach common at other banks.
If more large companies thought of their competitors as the upstarts that could encroach on them, rather than similarly sized rivals, it might encourage such a culture.
