Scale is a drug in the business world. We’re taught that bigger is safer, more efficient, and more profitable. But when something becomes truly enormous, the physics of business change. Things start to break in ways that a startup founder or even a mid-market CEO wouldn't recognize.
You’ve seen it.
Think about the Ever Given getting stuck in the Suez Canal in 2021. That was an enormous ship—roughly 400 meters long—carrying over 18,000 containers. When a vessel that size hits a snag, it doesn't just delay a few deliveries; it bottlenecks 12% of global trade and holds up $9 billion in goods every single day. That is the paradox of size. We build things at an enormous scale to save pennies on shipping costs, but we create systemic risks that can cost billions.
The Diseconomies of Scale
Economists love talking about "economies of scale." It’s the idea that as you produce more, the cost per unit drops. It makes sense. If you buy a million lightbulbs, you pay less per bulb than if you buy ten. But there is a tipping point. Eventually, you hit "diseconomies of scale." This is where an organization or a project becomes so enormous that the internal friction—the bureaucracy, the communication lag, the sheer weight of its own mass—starts to cost more than the efficiency gains.
Take Amazon. In 2022, they realized they had an enormous overcapacity problem. During the pandemic, they doubled their fulfillment network in just two years. They built and leased millions of square feet of warehouse space. It was a staggering, enormous expansion. But then the world opened back up. Suddenly, they were stuck with too much space, too many employees, and a cooling market. They had to pivot hard, subleasing at least 10 million square feet of space and cancelling dozens of warehouse projects.
Big isn't just a status; it’s a liability.
When a company gets that enormous, it loses its nerve endings. Information doesn't travel from the "skin" (the frontline workers) to the "brain" (the C-suite) fast enough. Decisions are made based on data that is already weeks old. By the time the leadership realizes a strategy isn't working, the momentum of their enormous operation makes it nearly impossible to turn the ship around quickly.
The Logistics of the Enormous
Let’s look at infrastructure. The "Big Dig" in Boston is the poster child for what happens when an enormous project meets reality. Originally estimated at $2.8 billion in the 1980s, it ended up costing over $14 billion (and much more when you factor in interest). It was an enormous undertaking involving miles of tunnels under a living city.
Why do these projects always fail the budget test?
Bent Flyvbjerg, a professor at Oxford and an expert on "megaprojects," has studied this for decades. He notes that enormous projects have a "fat tail" risk. They have a long duration, which means there is a 100% chance that something unexpected will happen—a recession, a pandemic, a change in government, or a technical failure. Small projects are over before the world changes. Enormous projects are built in one world and finished in another.
Managing the Unmanageable
If you're managing something enormous, you have to stop thinking like an architect and start thinking like an ecologist. You aren't building a structure; you're managing a system.
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- Modularize everything. If you can break an enormous goal into ten independent pieces, you reduce the risk of a total collapse. If one piece fails, the other nine survive.
- Kill the "Single Point of Failure." In an enormous supply chain, if you rely on one factory in one province of one country, you're asking for trouble.
- Accept the "Complexity Tax." Understand that every new layer of size adds a hidden cost in communication and oversight.
Why Investors Love (and Hate) Enormous Companies
The stock market has an obsession with the enormous. We look at the "Magnificent Seven"—Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, Tesla—and we see companies with enormous valuations that sometimes exceed the GDP of entire nations.
But there’s a catch.
When a company is that enormous, growth becomes mathematically difficult. If you’re a company doing $100 million in revenue, doubling to $200 million is a challenge, but it's doable. If you're Apple and you're doing nearly $400 billion in annual revenue, where do you find another $400 billion to double? You basically have to invent a new industry every five years just to keep the percentage growth moving.
This is why enormous companies often stop innovating and start "rent-seeking." They use their size to lobby for regulations that hurt smaller competitors, or they buy up any startup that looks like a threat. It’s a defensive crouch. They aren't growing because they're better; they're growing because they're enormous enough to swallow the competition.
The Psychological Weight of the Enormous
Human beings aren't really wired to comprehend enormous numbers. We can visualize five people. We can probably visualize a hundred. But can you truly visualize 1.5 million employees—the size of Walmart’s US workforce? No. It becomes an abstraction.
This abstraction is dangerous.
When people become numbers in an enormous system, empathy dies. This is how you get the horror stories of warehouse workers afraid to take bathroom breaks or corporate scandals where "no one knew" what the other department was doing. The enormous scale creates a mask of anonymity.
Honestly, it’s a bit scary.
We live in an era of enormous things: enormous data breaches, enormous debt, enormous climate shifts. The scale of our problems has outpaced the scale of our individual biological processing power. We try to manage these enormous realities with brains that evolved to track a small tribe and a few fruit trees.
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Making Small Moves in an Enormous World
So, how do you actually survive—and thrive—when everything around you is shifting toward this enormous scale? You have to find the "pockets of small."
In business, this means "intrapreneurship." It’s the practice of creating small, autonomous teams within an enormous corporation. These teams are given their own budgets and the freedom to fail without taking down the whole mothership. It’s how Google’s "X" (the moonshot factory) operates. They know that if they let the enormous corporate machine touch a new idea too early, the machine will crush it with "process" and "alignment."
Another strategy? Hyper-specialization.
The bigger the world gets, the more valuable it is to be the absolute best at one tiny, specific thing. While the enormous players fight over the mass market, the specialists own the niches. They have higher margins and more loyal customers. They aren't enormous, but they are indispensable.
Tangible Steps for Navigating Scale
If you are dealing with a project or business that is growing into something enormous, stop and audit your "connectivity."
- Map the dependencies. Use a simple flow chart to see how many people have to say "yes" before a project moves forward. If the number is more than five, you have an enormous bottleneck.
- Audit your meetings. Enormous organizations love meetings because they feel like work. They aren't. If a meeting has more than eight people, it’s a performance, not a collaboration.
- Go to the floor. If you’re a leader, spend time where the work actually happens. The further you are from the front line, the more your "enormous" perspective is actually just a hallucination based on filtered spreadsheets.
- Simplify the stack. In technology, we see enormous software "bloat." Every few years, a company should go through their tech stack and delete anything that doesn't provide core value. Less is more when the scale is huge.
The Future of Enormous
We are likely reaching "peak enormous." The trend in manufacturing is moving toward "reshoring" or "near-shoring." Companies are realizing that having an enormous, fragile supply chain that spans the globe is a liability. They would rather have a smaller, more resilient, local supply chain.
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3D printing and AI-driven automation are making small-scale production profitable again. You don't need an enormous factory in a low-wage country if a small robotic cell in Ohio can do the job for the same price without the shipping headache.
The "Size Era" might be giving way to the "Agility Era."
Being enormous was the winning strategy of the 20th century. It allowed for mass production and mass marketing. But in the 21st century, where markets change in a heartbeat and "viral" trends happen overnight, being enormous is often just another way of being slow.
Actionable Takeaways
- Review your risk exposure. Identify where your business or career relies on an enormous system you don't control. Create a "Plan B" that is local and manual.
- Prioritize resilience over efficiency. It's okay to pay a little more for a backup supplier or a redundant system. Efficiency is great until the enormous system breaks.
- Focus on the "Unit of One." Whether you're selling a product or managing a team, keep the focus on the individual experience. Don't let the enormous statistics blind you to the human reality.
- De-clutter your goals. Instead of one enormous, vague goal, set three sharp, small ones. You'll get more done and feel less overwhelmed by the scale of the task.
The world will always have enormous things. We will always build huge bridges, launch massive satellites, and run global corporations. But the trick to handling the enormous is to never lose sight of the small. Keep your teams tight, your communication clear, and your ego in check. Size is a tool, not a destination. Use it wisely, or it will eventually use you.