It’s conventional wisdom in business that bigger is better, and that being able to scale is an essential element of a company’s success. But there is a flaw at the heart of the concept of scaling, though it can be hard to articulate. Many of our ideas about scaling rest on foundational economic ideas eloquently espoused by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. The canonical text opens with a description of a pin factory in France to demonstrate the benefits of scaling. Looking at this story from a modern vantage shows important points that Smith — and the generations raised on his ideas — may have missed: that modern work thrives on boundary-crossing and integrative thinking, which create benefits far beyond those ascribed to simple conceptualizations of division of labor and specialization; that there are tradeoffs involved when we mechanize people through specialization; and that there may be other, better metrics to measure success. In light of this, it’s worth also considering other kind of scale: scaling a model, scaling impact, and scaling humanity, rather than growing individual companies.
