© Michael Lopp 2021
M. LoppManaging Humanshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-7116-2_50

50. The Old Guard

The cultural bellwether of the company
Michael Lopp1  
(1)
Los Gatos, CA, USA
 

Dunbar’s Number is a favorite blunt diagnosis for the pains that affect rapidly growing teams. The number, which is somewhere between 100 and 250, describes a point at which a group of people can no longer effectively maintain social connections in their respective heads. What was simple from a communication perspective becomes costly. What was a familiar family that you saw wandering the hallway becomes Stranger Town.

It resonates. It intuitively feels right that we have a threshold for the number of relationships we can maintain in our heads. If your team or company is ...

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