Can agile scale and does it matter?

Five years ago, when I visited Zappos, CEO Tony Hseih pointed out that as organizations grow they become less effective. Each person you add increases productivity by a little less than the previous employee. Eventually, a large organization takes man-years to do what a small one could do in man-weeks. We understand this intuitively. Hseih claimed this was universal to nearly all business – yet it didn’t have to be. He used the example of cities, where more people condensed in a smal