Running a major corporation has always been a challenge and today it’s tougher than ever. As a company grows in size and scope, it becomes more visible, more controversial, and more a target for every group with a gripe. Does Wal-Mart compete too effectively for its competitors? Pass laws to ban their stores from the city. Is a major homebuilder marketing its properties to appreciative buyers that can afford fine homes? Force them to sell some for a song to professional never-do-wells, thereby enhancing diversity. Has an industry enjoyed a particularly profitable period thanks to favorable circumstances? Enact an excess profits tax to strip those rogues of their unconscionable benefits, just to teach everyone a lesson.

To be sure, the large companies invite much of the criticism they incur. There is something about institutional size that brings out the worst in people. With apologies to Nineteenth Century English philosopher Lord Acton, it’s not unreasonable to say that prominence corrupts, and absolute prominence corrupts absolutely. Perhaps it’s analogous to the standard reply to the question: Where does a 900-pount gorilla sleep? Anywhere it wants. Thus, when a pharmaceutical firm holds the exclusive right to produce a drug that means life or death to masses of persons, they will naturally squeeze every dime they can from each desperate user. And why not? It’s only good business. It is this trait of human nature that pits the haves against the have-nots and ferments much of the world’s turmoil.

My personal attitude is that when it comes to business size, small is beautiful. Concentrating your efforts on profitability is preferable to wrestling with organizational regulation, structure, and involvement. Nothing depicts this reality more effectively and humorously than Scott Adams’ daily cartoon Dilbert. With that said, let me offer a testimonial as to how business should—and should not—be conducted. One of my enterprises is making mortgage loans on apartment buildings. My principal competitors are the multibillion-dollar financial organizations that normally take several months to process a loan request. Their procedures require formal application, credit verification, appraisal, loan committee approval, document preparation, and a host of inexplicable convolutions that drag on interminably. My associate and I operate somewhat differently. Should a prospective borrower phone in mid-morning, we normally inspect the property, determine its value, verify a specific loan amount, and commit to 10-day funding later the same day. As a result we generate sound loans that satisfy our borrowers; there’s not a major lender that can compete with us.

A concluding thought:
Inherent in all large organizations is an attitude described as corporate mentality. It’s basic failing was depicted by one causal line in Herman Wouk’s 1951 novel, The Caine Mutiny, describing the U.S Navy—one of the nation’s largest establishments. He remarked that it was an organization designed by geniuses to be run by idiots.