How to Tell Whether You Run a Big Company

One of the fundamental measures of whether you run (or work at) a "big company" is qualitative rather than quantitative.

It's not a measure of how many employees you have, nor your geographic spread, nor your market cap, whether you are publicly traded, have been around for a long time, or hold a certain position in the market. It's not even about whether your company is a desirable place to work.

Rather, it's the extent to which employees in your company are posed with choices that align them with company success. How frequently do your employees find themselves posed with a decision in the workplace where choosing "A" is the right choice for them, and their career, but choosing "B" is the right choice for the company? One of the most useful measure of company "size" is actually a measure of how often those two choices diverge, and how far they diverge from one another.

A small company is one where there is seldom a difference between the two, and a large company is where the two infrequently align. Hogwash, you say. We reward people for choosing "B" all the time. Good for you. Please send me the name of your company so I can make sure I am not investing in it. I want to invest in companies where even when an employee chooses "A", the company benefits.

It's not whether being big or small by this measure is inherently better or worse. Rather, it's being realistic about how your company operates and optimizes around that frank assessment. And it's only really dangerous if you don't know how things are working.  Because you want to be the rat building the maze, not the rat in the maze.

Of course, this is a separate discussion from What kind of company do you want to run?, or What kind of company do you want to work for? Those are important things to understand.  They also tend to change over time based on life circumstances. And they are topics for another day.