A few years ago, a landmark Stanford study came out showing that people tasked with remembering one digit made much better decisions than people charged with remembering seven digits. The two groups were each presented with a choice to eat calorie-laden cake or healthy fruit. The seven-digit crowd ate 50% more cake. The culprit: Cognitive load. “When you give people cognitive load, they lose will and concentration,” says Bob Sutton, organizational behavior expert at Stanford’s School of Engineering. The challenge is that your company is bound to add cognitive load and gain complexity as you grow. The reality is you do need more roles, more hierarchy, more process. It's unavoidable. It's also a lesson Larry Page learned the hard way when Google entered hyper-growth in the early 2000s.“When Google got up to about 400 people, he started longing for the good old days when they didn’t have all these annoying managers around,”...
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