Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

by Safi Bahcall

in 2000, Malcolm Gladwell published The Tipping Point, a blockbuster that included a chapter titled “The Magic Number 150.” The chapter summarized Dunbar’s monkey brain vs. group size results, as well as Dunbar’s observations that mean group sizes in some hunter-gatherer societies and the “smallest independent units” of professional armies cluster around this number. Gladwell added the interesting example of W. L. Gore Associates, the maker of Gore-Tex fabric, which limits how many people work together in one building. “We put a hundred and fifty parking spaces in the lot,” the president, Bill Gore, said. “When people start parking on the grass, we know it’s time to build a new plant.”

FAST Agile scales by Dunbar's number!