Maintaining the spirit of excitement in growing companies

One of the most critical issues facing managers of high tech companies is how to retain the spirit of excitement and energy as the company grows. Interviews with managers of these companies reflected the view that the spirit of excitement and energy which is so palatable in smaller software companies, somehow dissipates in a seemingly inevitable way as the company increases in size. (The notion that "something happens" when a company gets "too big" is a common one.) The question arising from this for managers is how that spirit of excitement or high level of motivation is created in the first place, and how it can be retained. In this commentary, some preliminary findings concerning the excitement levels in different size high tech companies are presented.The findings are based on the questionnaire results of 339 people from 11 high tech software companies; 7 "small" companies with less than 50 employees, 3 "medium" sized companies with between 150-250 employees and 1 "large" company with over 2, 000 employees in total.The average response rate for all companies was 55%. For the small companies it was much higher, at 68%, but in the large company it was 51%. The average age of the sample was 28 years, average years in present company was 2.5 years, 80 were women with 259 men. Most (96%) have at least a Bachelors degree so they represent a highly educated sample.