As Gore has grown in recent years, the company has undergone an almost constant process of division and redivision. Other companies would just keep adding additions to the main plant, or extend a production line, or double shifts. Gore tries to split up groups into smaller and smaller pieces.
This Schumachian strategy of staying small seems to be working—but it depends on a clear sense of organizational intentions. Bill Gore’s founding views for his company were influenced by the then new best seller by Douglas McGregor, The Human Side of Enterprise. His views and underling vision for his company are the glue (the integrative function) (Gladwell, 2002, p. 184)
Gore is . . .a very unusual company with a clear and well-articulated philosophy. It is a big established company attempting to behave like a small entrepreneurial start-up. By all accounts that attempt has been wildly successful. Whenever business experts make lists of the best American companies to work for, or whenever consultants give speeches on the best-managed American companies, Gore is on the list.
Gladwell’s views seem to be widely shared with other management gurus (such as Jim Collins and Gary Hamel). Furthermore, the perspectives and practices of Bill Gore has been carried on by his successors.
While Schumacher would undoubtedly be delighted with the success of Gore-Tex, he was quite circumspect about the role of small organizations in the broader ecology of contemporary organizational life. Schumacher emphasized the role of diversity in institutional size and scale. While some of Schumacher’s critics portrayed him as always advocating small-sized organizations, he actually advocated the selection of an appropriate size for organizations—not just small size (Schumacher, 1973):
For every activity there is a certain appropriate scale, and the more active and intimate the activity, the smaller the number of people that can take part, [and] the greater is the number of such relationship arrangements that need to be established. . . . What scale is appropriate? It depends on what we are trying to do. The question of scale is extremely crucial today, in political, social and economic affairs just as in almost everything else.
What then are we trying to do and when is being small not such a good thing?
