August 9, 2001
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The idea of getting back to work on a regular basis has been clunking around in my head more frequently of late. I’m not referring to yard maintenance or puttering around the house or even contract consulting. I’m thinking of a full-time, away from the house, surrounded by a bunch of geeks like me kind of thing. You know, a job. Just the prospect of going back into this type of situation inevitably triggers reflection on why I left my previous job in the first place. Up until this point, I honestly couldn’t nail the reason down to anything other than it felt like it was time to leave. Last night I read following passage from the book Accidental Empires. It doesn’t completely explain why I left, but it describes something that is amazingly accurate, yet wasn’t evident until now.
“Reasons other than boredom and pent-up ambition cause early employees to leave successful young companies. As companies get bigger, they become more organized and process driven, which leads to more waste. Great individual contributors are very efficient. They hate waste and are good indicators of its presence. When the best people start to bail out, it’s a sign that there is too much waste.”
I was one of the original employees at this small company called Image Club Graphics. Over the years, Image Club was grown, morphed, acquired, rebranded, spun-out, rebranded again, acquired again, and ultimately killed off. We lived through two distinct periods of amazing growth. I never thought of the growth as wasteful at the time, because of a couple of factors. With growth, the speed at which many things happen increases. The faster things happen, the more oblivious you become to the amount of resources and people needed to complete those things. You need to get these things done, and they get done. Period. Of course, growth also slows down other things, like decision making. As you’re waiting for decisions to be made, you start to realize how many of those resources and people are being wasted during the time you are waiting. That is frustrating. I realize now that much of the frustration and antsiness I felt was not because our company had become too big or too corporate or too bureaucratic, it was because it had become too wasteful and inefficient.
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