Scalessness - No. 39

One of the effects of industrialization and globalization has been a cultural obsession with scale. We can sell a product to millions of people on multiple continents and in many different countries. A message can be shared simultaneously with people around the world. Now, through technology, every person has the potential to take something to scale. From startups to manufacturing, packaged goods, media, influencers, and content producers, the goal in most industries is to reach as many people as possible. The key to success has increasingly become scale. Every part of our brave new world is an ongoing experiment with scaling anything and everything in the name of success. When we distill most current cultural measures of success down to their most fundamental level, we find two metrics driving everything: how many and how much. This has created a big problem for us all. We weren’t made for scale.