Step Aside Mr Bezos, The Future Belongs To The Little Ships.

The world needs big companies. 

So said Jeff Bezos, founder and captain of the biggest, Amazon, at his US Government Senate hearing on Wednesday. A prepared statement in defence of the large. 

We need big companies because “you’re not going to create an all fibre 787 in your garage”. 

This is not a reason for big companies. Far from it. 

You don’t need big companies to create an all fibre 787 - or whatever; you need coordination and cooperation. Yes, big companies are good at coordination. This is what they do most of; coordinating assets and resources. They have armies of people dedicated to it.

That said, a big company’s primary motivation, like any organism, is to sustain itself. Homeostasis.

Why The World Needs Small Companies

Big companies are interested in survival not service.

The world doesn’t need big companies. It needs small companies; small company ways of thinking, working and acting. 

In a small company:

• you're connected to outcome in a visceral way.

• Action and outcome are real felt, feedback loops.

• There is no room to hide. No roles for roles sake.

• You’re useful or you die.

In small companies, everything and everyone is oriented to and focused on the most important thing.

In big companies there is no single most important thing. The ‘most important’ are many and varied and self serving.

Big companies lose their usefulness. 

Covid will drive a bus through our economy, through our very expectations. 

The economy dived because, stuck at home, we stopped buying things. Now they urge us to buy things we've since realised we don't need. Hollow words. Confusing times. The wheels on that bus can’t keep going round and round.

We don't need big companies. We need small. 

We need companies which provide work where people feel connected to outcome, oriented to usefulness. We need work which is local, crafted. We are a spectrum of life and opportunity.

Big companies are monochrome. We are not monochrome.

Little companies bubble and fizz with energy, life and opportunity. 

Saved By A Flotilla Of Little Ships?

On June 4th 1940 thousands of little ships sailed to the rescue of the retreating armies.

This is what we need now. Little ships, little companies, to ride to the rescue of a broken economy, of broken habitats and ecology and empty work. 

If you're in a big company, fear not. Resilience, creativity, adaptability is found in little company spirit, mindset and approach. If you're in a big company, fragment, create villages, create thousands and thousands of little ships, where local captains and crew are accountable and rewarded for work they do and oriented to real genuine usefulness. 

Little ships, like little companies, are nimble.

Nudge the tiller and change direction.

Little companies have no room for spare passengers.

Little companies must respond to the changing, prevailing conditions in real time. 

And when coordinated together little ships can achieve unimaginable things, like evacuating entire armies from foreign lands. 

Come together. Do the work. Disband. 

If we can move an army. We can create a plane. 

We need more little ships, Mr Bezos. Thanks very much.