Them, released in 1954, was the first movie to feature giant insects threatening humanity. It's an idea that has been revisited and riffed on several times in the last 70 years. If you've seen one of those films, you've probably wondered why the biggest ants we have to deal with in real life only get up to six centimeters in length (an easily squishable size), while the biggest land mammal can reach almost 4 meters in height and 11,000 kilograms in weight.

The reason is the simplicity of the ant relative to the elephant. Ants have an exoskeleton rather than an internal supporting structure. Instead of lungs, they have tiny tubes that allow air to pass from openings in the exoskeleton directly to internal organs. They have a circulatory system for passing nutrients to organs, but rather than moving through vessels, it mostly fills a cavity in the insect and is kept moving by a single pumping vessel open at both ends that runs the length of the body.

None of those things would work adequately if you scaled an ant to the size of an elephant. When you scale an object, its mass increases proportionally to the cube of its dimensions, but its surface area increases proportionally to the square of its dimensions. The exoskeleton would not be strong enough to support the weight, and the respiratory and circulator systems would be inadequate to do their jobs as well. Larger size requires more complex systems.

What does this have to do with businesses or other social organizations? The same general principle applies. As the number of internal people grow, the proportion of organizational resources that have to be dedicated to dealing with the internal needs rather than customer needs inevitably grows along with it. If you're a one person shop, most of your time can be spent on selling and delivering your product or service. The downside is that unless your product is some form of intellectual property that has infinite scalability through licensing or digital distribution, you will quickly hit the limit of how much you can grow without adding people.

Most of your early hires will be people who either sell or deliver, but as you get beyond a handful of people who report directly to you, the need to have team members who spend all of their time on maintaining the health of the organization becomes unavoidable. If you have even a couple hundred employees, now a surprising amount of time and money will be spent on things like:

• Internal communications
• Managing employee performance and development
• Dealing with HR planning (compensation, org charts, career paths, etc.)
• Purchasing and implementing systems to make their work smoother
• Defining and updating policies
• And too many others to mention

Much of that work will be done by people who focus exclusively on it. You can quickly reach a point where many employees have never met a customer or seen your product.

The combination of diverted attention and reduced awareness of what's going on in the market can be deadly. Too much attention to what employee and managers care about relative to what customers care about is a part of many stories of market leaders who stumbled like GE, Kodak, and Sears.

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