In some ways a company in it’s early years is like a stem cell. It has the capacity to grow into many types of organizations. At some critical juncture a signal comes along that points it one direction or another. It can grow into a free form organization like the legendary Silicon Valley startups where imagination is expected, there are free cokes in the fridge, and there are open spaces where employees can toss Nerf balls. On the other extreme are organizations that wear a more grim decorum. My experience has been that the petroleum and automotive industries are a little tighter in the puckerstrings. Companies evolve in response to their circumstances and in response to the people who run them.
As a company grows, it has to take on more people to manage the workload. But a bigger head count means more degrees of freedom; that is to say, there are more nodes in any given decision tree; more ways of doing things; more preferences to be managed. A bigger head count means that more failure modes are possible. More ways of having a disaster. More ways of having people problems.
In response to this, even the most well intended business founder must develop systems to contain and direct the energies of its people. Some people naturally pitch in and contribute to the good of the whole. Others specialize in gaming the system to their advantage. But the overall tone of any organization is set by the leaders. Some are old testament and others are new testament. Some require stonings and blood sacrifice and others use the redemption approach.
Business isn’t just an math exercise. There is a lot of anthropology to it. Unfortunately, anthropology isn’t on the curriculum of most MBA programs. MBA’s worry me. They seem to be hustling the rest of us into an Orwellian future with methodologies taught by faculty that may not have actually been business people.
Readers may doubt the merits of this conclusion. But, wait until you take a personality profile test to qualify for promotion or a job. The examiner will sit you down afterwards and tell you that the numbers say that your path has already been determined by this profile. What do you think the psychology graduates have been doing the last 30 years? Not all of them have been doing marriage counseling all this time. Many have been developing these test “instruments” for consultants and HR departments. It’s a scary world.
Lamentations on Chemistry 
Two thoughts: 1) I like the anthropology angle. To me, running a business (other than a very small business) is one of the most complicated human endevors ever, partly because of this internal aspect of “managing” people.
2) The problem I have with B-schools in general as that there is never any feedback or testing of their hypotheses. Look at your classic “Case studies” as developed by Harvard. You look at some information, and draw a conclusion. Do they ever apply the conclusion in another case to see if it works?
I have been subject to several waves of B-school philosophy in the last 10 years. Management consultants will show up with their whizbang methods from B-school and attempt to apply it to everything in sight. When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you’re a consultant with a bag full of buzzwords and a software tool, you have a set of deliverables that you can dazzle nervous presidents and CEO’s with. In the end, what turns around a business is a firm grip on reality and the willingness to work hard and stay on task.