A Company is like a Sphere

Where do these great analogy ideas come from? Full credit – I got this one from a speaker at the SAP Research Center in Palo Alto, last spring.

A company is like a sphere.

As it grows, volume increases much faster than surface area, and the large a company gets, way more people get embedded and hidden from the end customer than are on the fringe, in customer-facing roles.

As a general rule, this is a bad thing. Well, maybe a less-than-optimal thing – what percentage of your corporate attention span is customer-focused?

Our Challenge is to poke some pockets into the surface, and get more surface area exposed to the outside air.

• Will this help a company go farther? It seems to work for golf balls …
• Will this make the company more human? Perhaps, in a self-fulfilling / reverse fractal kind of way …
• Will rough edges generate incremental profit? Some counterintuitive friction …

Previously …

• Heisenburg KM (July 13, 2004)
• Customer DNA – A Different Take on Understanding Markets and Networks (June 11, 2005)
• Misapplying the Pareto principle (January 7, 2006)
• Interesting How the Mind Works (October 1, 2007)
• Innovation That Matters – Substance Over Style (January 12, 2008)
• Failing Faster .. …

Where do these great analogy ideas come from? Full credit – I got this one from a speaker at the SAP Research Center in Palo Alto, last spring.

A company is like a sphere.

As it grows, volume increases much faster than surface area, and the large a company gets, way more people get embedded and hidden from the end customer than are on the fringe, in customer-facing roles.

As a general rule, this is a bad thing. Well, maybe a less-than-optimal thing – what percentage of your corporate attention span is customer-focused?

Our Challenge is to poke some pockets into the surface, and get more surface area exposed to the outside air.

• Will this help a company go farther? It seems to work for golf balls …
• Will this make the company more human? Perhaps, in a self-fulfilling / reverse fractal kind of way …
• Will rough edges generate incremental profit? Some counterintuitive friction …

Previously …

• Heisenburg KM (July 13, 2004)
• Customer DNA – A Different Take on Understanding Markets and Networks (June 11, 2005)
• Misapplying the Pareto principle (January 7, 2006)
• Interesting How the Mind Works (October 1, 2007)
• Innovation That Matters – Substance Over Style (January 12, 2008)
• Failing Faster (June 14, 2009)

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