Small is beautiful

I had a bad day at work. The company I work for makes several billion € profit every year, but it is so inefficient, bureaucratic and badly organized. You need dozens of badly-designed forms for everything, and when you call to inquire why your telephone number hasn't been moved yet from room #1 to room #2 after an internal move there is nobody who can help you. Nobody is responsible for anything, every individual only controls a tiny part of any procedure. Chaos is the result. In short: I have had it with this company and it is really, really time to move.

Almost certainly I will soon work for a small start-up company and I am so looking forward to not having to deal with internal bureaucracy. I am sure there will be other challenges and problems in my new job (such as having to worry if they can pay my salary at the end of the month), but everything is better than staying with my current employer. Enough is enough.

I was reminded of the book that I read when I was in high school and made a big impression on me at the time: "Small is beautiful" by E.F. Schumacher. (first published in 1973) Schumacher was a respected economist who opposed the neo-classical economics by declaring that single-minded concentration on output and technology was dehumanizing, that one's workplace should be dignified and meaningful first, efficient second, and that nature is priceless. Schumacher proposed the idea of "smallness within bigness"; in other words, a specific form of decentralization: for a large organization to work it must behave like a related group of small organizations. Schumacher's work coincided with the growth of ecological concerns and with the birth of environmentalism.

Some quotes from the book that are even more true today than they were 34 years ago:

"Ever bigger machines, entailing ever bigger concentrations of economic power and exerting ever greater violence against the environment, do not represent progress: they are a denial of wisdom. Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the non-violent, the elegant and beautiful."

"Greed and envy demand continuous and limitless economic growth of a material kind, without proper regard for conservation, and this type of growth cannot possibly fit into a finite environment. We must therefore study the essential nature of the private enterprise system and the possibilities of evolving an alternative system which might fit the new situation."

I sincerely believe that mankind is destroying the planet: another 100 years, maybe 200, and this planet will be uninhabitable. And even a thousand Al Gore's will not be able to stop this process: human nature is all about greed and envy, as Schumacher wrote, and the process of consuming more, and more, and more, and......, will be very difficult to stop.