I was riding the escalator up to the front entrance of my office when I was struck by a sudden memory. The incident I recalled happened over ten years ago. I was getting a ride to a summer basketball game from one of my teammates. We were stopped at a red light behind a line of cars. As the light turned green, we watched the cars in front of us slowly start to move forward. One by one, the cars accelerated in sequence until the space in front of us was clear. We had only just started to move forward when the light in front of us turned yellow, then red. We stopped.
My teammate hit the top of the steering wheel in frustration.
“You know what would be great,” he said. “If everyone knew that when the light turned green, you would accelerate at the same time. That way, everyone would be moving at the same speed and no one would crash. And, more people would get through the green light in time.”
I don’t remember what I thought of the idea at the time – maybe I thought it sounded similar to the kind of humor Seinfeld became famous for. I do know what I think about it now, however – my former teammate would have no chance at a corporation. In a corporation, the sheer volume of employees creates an internal inertia that makes it hard for any individual to ever move at top speed. To put it another way, in a corporation a green light might mean having to wait for the seven thousand people in front of you to start driving before you are able to move.
I remember once reading an essay Paul Graham wrote about this idea. His analogy of choice was a galley ship. On the ship, everyone could row in synch and the boat would move at a steady clip. However, there would inevitably be people would could row faster than their colleagues. These rowers could never make the ship move faster, however, just by rowing harder – the boat would simply be too big. When people leave big companies to form their own smaller competitors, this is essentially what is going on – it would be like the ten best rowers deciding they could move faster if they were rowing as hard as they could on a smaller boat.
The escalator was the obvious place for me to think about this. The escalator into our office building is single file and therefore unable to accommodate multiple people entering the building at a time. As a result, usually a line forms at the foot of the escalator as my colleagues wait to get into the building. It creates a situation where everyone is moving as fast as possible at all times yet moving much slower than their actual top speed. It’s the perfect analogy for the start of my workday – we’re all going as fast as we can... wink wink... but in reality we know we aren’t really going very fast at all.
