The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

by Malcolm Gladwell

Gore has managed to create a small-company ethos so infectious and sticky that it has survived their growth into a billion-dollar company with thousands of employees. And how did they do that? By (among other things) adhering to the Rule of 150. Wilbert “Bill” Gore—the late founder of the company—was no more influenced, of course, by the ideas of Robin Dunbar than the Hutterites were. Like them, he seems to have stumbled on the principle by trial and error. “We found again and again that things get clumsy at a hundred and fifty,” he told an interviewer some years ago, so 150 employees per plant became the company goal. In the electronics division of the company, that means that no plant was built larger than 50,000 square feet, since there was almost no way to put many more than 150 people in a building that size. “People used to ask me, how do you do your long-term planning,” Hen said. “And I’d say, that’s easy, we put a hundred and fifty parking spaces in the lot, and when people start parking on the grass, we know it’s time to build a new plant.” That new plant doesn’t have to be far away. In Gore’s home state of Delaware, for instance, the company has three plants within sight of each other.

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