In GGS,  Jared Diamond mentions a few isolated cases when a society rejected technology and what I see as 'scalability' in favor of tradition or because of an overly centralized and powerful government with bad ideas.   In the book I am reading now, 'The Black Swan', Nassim Taleb touches on a similar point when he discusses what can be seen as scalable and not scalable professions.  He mentions doctors, restaurants and bakers as having a well defined limitation on the number of customers/revenue opportunities they can service.   On the scalable side,  he mentions authors and modern musicians. He goes on to elaborate on some of the winner-takes-all problems with scalable professions where there ends up being very few giants and most of the rest are left out of the rewards.

 

This reminds me of previously mentioned societies and how they rejected scalability. In one example Japan, after having much experience with gun powder, eliminated guns completely from their society only to be on the losing side of a conflict with armed European powers a few decades later.

 

In getting into 'Black Swan' thinking of unlikely exceptions to what seem to be rules - I wonder if there is ever a case in business where designing for non-scalability,  where rejecting all the things we expect should be a part of "a winning business" (web 2.0, automation, computers, etc) would produce better results.   I guess the problem with this is that no one would notice - because the sheer total dollar amounts would not be on top of a list of "large companies" only the profitability, team satisfaction and quality of life measurements could be off the charts - but it would be hard to beat a company like GE or Microsoft in a revenue comparison without designing and executing on the assumption that scale should be attained as its own self-fulfilling goal.