Long-form notes on decision architecture, institutional clarity, and non-predictive intelligence design.
The company that was easy to run at fifteen people is hard to run at sixty. Nothing broke. The same people, the same product, the same owner. And every week there is a new meeting about a problem that did not exist two years ago, and the meeting produces another process, and the process produces another meeting.
The team pulls together when the owner is in the room. When he travels, it separates into the sales camp, the accounts camp and the people who came with the family. Nobody planned this. It is simply what the company does when the one thing holding it together is absent.
The owner delegates the purchase function to the new manager on a Monday. On Wednesday the manager asks whether he should go with the usual vendor. On Friday the owner is approving purchase orders again and has concluded that delegation does not work with this team. The authority went out and came back in five days.
Every owner-run company is centralised. None of them decided to be. The question Fayol asked was not whether to centralise but how much, and the honest answer in most SMEs is that nobody has ever asked.
The owner of a forty-person company has, on paper, six direct reports. In practice he has forty, because everyone in the building knows the fastest way to a decision is to walk into his cabin. His span of control is not six. It is the whole company, and it is why he is in the office at nine at night.
Draw the line of authority in a textbook company and you get a ladder: owner, general manager, department head, supervisor, worker. Draw it in a forty-person Indian company and you get a wheel. Every spoke ends at the owner. There is no chain because there is only one link.
The purchase manager has two bosses. The father, who founded the company and still approves vendors. The son, who runs operations and wants faster deliveries. On Monday the father says use the old supplier. On Tuesday the son says switch. The purchase manager has learned the only safe move, which is to do nothing until they agree.
The sales manager owns the quarter's number. He cannot approve a 5% discount. The plant head is answerable for on-time dispatch. He cannot sanction overtime. Both are held responsible for outcomes they are not permitted to produce, and both have learned the only move that works, which is to ask the owner.
The first principle on Fayol's list is the one every company follows without being told, right up to the top, where it stops.
