Humans grow linearly, companies grow exponentially – interview with Khalid Halim

Aa realisation I'd had a few years back was that networks -- and here I'm talking about any organisation of components with flows, not just data networks, but people, organisations, cities, companies, markets, transport, conversations or discussion boards, etc., -- have several characteristics which govern behaviour. These define a large class of hence related dynamics.

There's topology: (peer, star, chain, ring, mesh, tree, , web, complex...). There's scale: null, unary, pair, triple (largest size where links equal nodes), 4 (first where links exceed nodes), etc. And the scale effects discussed here resemble those I've noted.

At large scale, scale tends to domininate topology in large part as there's only one viable topology, the dendritic tree (this is West's bugbear).

There's also network depth -- the number of nodes between pairs, particularly on average. Even relatively shaallow depths can have huge significance, think Six Degrees of Separation (or Kevin Bacon): this gives you everyone within a substantial industry (cinema) or even the world (Facebook, national security agency threat matrices).

Related is the characteristic of specific individuals -- superstars and regression toward the mean. A Gresham's Law type effect means that the effective functional level of a group is set by its least capable rather than most capable members (absent some means of effective management or moderation), another tendency which favours smaller groups initially.

It's also worth noting that certain transition points, such as HR being required as headcount climbs above 50, are determined by regulatory requiremment -- beware outside influences in anacdotal observation.

A particularly pervasive similarity comes to mind between agriculture and media, and how scale, topology, node characteristics, and complexity result in conceptually similar activity models. This is, of course, broadcasting. Named for the farmer casting seed on fields, the analogy continues when the harvest is considered: the mass-gathering of commodity high-utility carbohydrates through a uniform and undifferentiated processing. In media, this is advertising. And the results are similar: focus is on nondifferentiation, uniform processing, and maximising harvest yield, not the field's (or audience's) quality experience.

It's also interexting to note that even before the term was adopted there was a trend to more targeted cultivation in ag, including Jethro Tull's seed drills (and those of China long preceeding him), pressaging moves to media segmentation and targeting.

It's also possible that there are other ag analogies which might prove useful or insightful: herd-tending (prevalent in religious contexts), orchards, forestry, foraging, hunting, fishing, vegetable vs. staple crops, reserving methods such as fermentation, etc. Food for thought, as it were....

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/26/business/dealbook/geoffre...

Using a Presidential analogy, it advocates a style much like Reagan. Founders should focus on vision and being the flagbearer of that standard. Then have the cleverness to delegate much of the responsibility for keeping the ship afloat to talented individuals without regard for ego. As a general process, seems reasonable. Probably less stress, more focus on important tasks. To an extreme, you become detached and unaware of the undercurrents within your firm. The vision can wander because it is decoupled from reality on the ground.

On the counter side, I would argue there is value in being more akin to a Clinton style figurehead. Fairly well known for keeping abreast of everything, to the point of annoyance. Leaving people people free to do what they do, ie, not micro-managing, but being aware of what is occurring - remaining engaged. To an extreme, you are obsessive and obstructing rather than staying informed. High stress, and not enough time maintaining vision and outlook.

Needs both, and fundamentally disagree that we as entities are limited to a "linear" growth. It may just seem linear as you approach the event horizon. To those far away, your change is remarkable.

I see a lot of Military leadership or Military strategy ideas referenced around the startup world as valuable lessons. Yet actual Military members or Veterans, outside of some "hiring veterans" efforts, aren't held in particularly high regard in the valley.

Why the Delta?

A) Biology is not inherently linear, at all. If I had to pick a single scaling function to identify with biology, I would pick the exponential.

B) "Biologically, we are sprinting beings, not marathon beings." is utterly untrue. We evolved as persistence hunters, we're woefully ineffective sprinters. Basically all large animals are dramatically faster than us.

Good article, but man do I hate woo bad analogies like this. It's almost as bad as the guys that talk about "Quantum" crap when I'm just looking for decent meditation help.

almost nothing grows exponentially unless there's a recurrence relation or difference equation involved.

http://firstround.com/review/hypergrowth-and-the-law-of-star...

see in part and relevant to the title of this thread

> “Human beings grow biologically and linearly. A year from now, you will be a year older — there's no growth hacking we can do to make that happen faster. Even if we were looking at the metrics of ‘you’—the age of your bones, your height, everything — you're not going to grow exponentially. You're going to grow linearly because all biological systems do that,” says Halim. “A company, which is a collection of biological systems called humans, can grow exponentially. Especially in tech, companies exist in a world in which you can be serving 100 customers one day, and a million a year later.”

Want to find the root of a function? Under mild assumptions, Newton iteration gives accuracy that improves as an exponential function of the number of iterations. This situation is especially well known and easy to see for finding square roots.

I will make an argument the other way around, that it's humans who can grow exponentially (for a while) and companies grow at best linearly!!

Okay, the first example is Leo Szilard walking across a street and then soaking in a bathtub: He thought, one neutron hits one uranium nucleus which emits two neutrons, ..., four neutrons ... and after positive integer n such generations we have 2^n neutrons emitted. So, that was exponential growth, all from just Leo walking and later soaking in a bath tub.

Then for an organization, at Oak Ridge the were getting about, what was it, 10 grams a day of separated uranium. So, for 100 grams a day, have 10 times more working units, that is, linear growth.

Then when it appeared that maybe one approach to uranium enrichment might not work, try three. Linear growth.

When it appeared that uranium might be too tough to get, try plutonium. Work with two elements instead of just one, double the number of elements, people, facilities, money, results, etc. and get two paths to success instead of one. All linear.

Then Edward Teller had another exponential idea: Let the X-rays from fission squeeze deuterium for another essentially exponential growth rate.

For another example, Alan Guth wanted to do something so dreamed up the big bang, where exponential growth seems even an understatement. So, Guth had exponential growth.

Since then various organizations have gotten data that confirm what Guth thought, and the growth of those organizations have been essentially linear, that is, twice as much money, people, time yield twice as many new results, e.g., the 3 K background radiation and accelerating growth of the universe.

For more, for the traveling salesman problem in Euclidean spaces, R. Karp had an idea -- on problems with positive integer n cities, for any probability p < 1, and for any epsilon > 0, a simple application of minimum spanning trees will as n grows, with probability greater than p get feasible solutions within epsilon percent of optimality. So, as n grows, the number of traveling salesman tours grows exponentially, really n! (use Sterling's approximation to get an exponential), and Karp's idea was exponentially powerful, that is, the minimum spanning tree effort grows only as a polynomial in n but beats the exponential challenge of the problem.

For another, linear programming commonly has the number of feasible region extreme points growing exponentially with problem size, but the polynomial algorithms can find the possibly unique extreme point in only polynomial time. If divide by the polynomial, then get linear effort, and the exponential number of extreme points divided by the polynomial is still exponential. So, the polynomial algorithm idea, one of them from the head of just one person, was exponentially powerful.

For another example, Moore's law, so far still exponential but from the brains of mostly just a few people and brought to market by essentially linear time, money, people, etc. Want twice as many chips? Okay, that linear; build two fabs instead of one and get twice as many chips -- linear.

For another, Alexander Fleming looked at some bread mold and how it fought off some bacteria. Presto, bingo, he had penicillin that saved exponentially many lives.

There are lots of other examples where people grew by having exponentially powerful ideas while organizations were limited by twice as much in people, time, and money gives at best, twice as much revenue, maybe less due to the quadratic growth of the overhead of internal communications as the number of people in the organization grows.

Net, the big stuff, the stuff with exponential power, is from people, commonly one or at most only a few people, where a company to exploit the exponentially powerful work grows only linearly, that is, twice as many people, etc. in the company result in twice as many customers served.