Mary Panttaja

Why Doing More With Less is an Important Opportunity

There have always been ways for people to create businesses and organizations that are small and controlled. But in most situations, this meant that the organization would have a small reach: a local contractor, a small printer, a regional consulting service. You could often control the quality of your partners, pick and choose who to work with, find a small consort of like-minded individuals.

But for the most part, you could only build a company with a small reach—that is, it was difficult to speak to a lot of people, or provide services across the country, or to market around the world. If you had a really big dream, a far reaching goal, you needed to build a larger organization, taking on all the subsequent distraction that size brings.

But the advances in communication and connectivity have delivered profound solutions: distributed platforms for working with partners and employees, dynamic platforms for outreach to your customers. In addition, as Chris Anderson and others point out, the means of production for some many of our products are now in the hands of individuals: I can write, print, publish, and market my own books from the comfort of my living room; film makers can write, shoot, edit, and distribute video from any where in the world and connect with an available audience; I have a single laptop on which I can develop almost any kind of software with tools that I can buy without getting up off the sofa. (One of my favorite work sites.)

Because of ubiquitous communications, powerful personal computers, and evolving software tools, delivering a product or service to market now takes:

• Less money

• Less time

• AND FEWER PEOPLE

And, from my current perspective, as one looking for ways to deliver my inspirations to the market place, I am intrigued with how important it is that it can be done with fewer people. A concentrated, inspired set of partners can deliver products and services of value to millions of people. How incredible is that? How focused can our potential be? How much can we control our efforts and minimize the possibilities of diluted potential? With fewer of us, can we be more effective at staying aligned and coherent in our goals, intentions, and actions?

Of course, most of us love to work with others and we want to have partners in crime and inspiration. But since every inspired participant can do more and be more productive, we can each leverage more of our personal potential to the fulfilling of our joint dreams, with better odds of building a organization that can truly build potential geometrically.

E.F. Schumacher, the economist, in his 1973 book, Small is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered, inspired a generation of us to examine our lives and and our work through another lense. As the new economic realities come into play, we can see that small is not only beautiful, but that it can be globally powerful as well.

What are you going to be doing next?