"GORE-TEX, the company that makes wetsuits, hiking boots and ponchos, is the subject of a famous anecdote in the world of sociology. It centers on the guy who founded the company, Bill Gore.
"When Bill Gore set the company up, he set it up in his backyard," Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary anthropology at the University of Oxford, tells NPR's Rachel Martin.
From its modest beginnings, GORE-TEX grew and grew, Dunbar says, until Gore opened up a large factory. That, too, continued to grow.
Then one day, Dunbar says, Gore walked into his factory.
"And he simply didn't know who everybody was."
Gore wondered why this was. "It was his gut instinct," Dunbar says, "that the bigger a company got, people working for the company were much less likely to work hard and help each other out."
Gore did some counting, and realized that after putting about 150 people in the same building, things at GORE-TEX just did not run smoothly. People couldn't keep track of each other. Any sense of community was gone.
So Gore made the decision to cap his factories at 150 employees.
"Whenever they needed to expand the company," Dunbar says, "he would just build a new factory. Sometimes right on the parking lot next door."
Things ran better this way, Gore realized. In smaller factories, Dunbar says, "everybody knew who was who. Who was the manager, who was the accountant, who made the sandwiches for lunch."
Business was never better. One-hundred fifty, it seemed, was a magic number."
"Most of Dunbar's research has focused on why the GORE-TEX model was a success. That model is based on the idea that human beings can hold only about 150 meaningful relationships in their heads. Dunbar has researched the idea so deeply, the number 150 has been dubbed "Dunbar's Number."
Ironically, the term was coined on Facebook, where 150 friends may seem like precious few.
"There was a discussion by people saying 'I've got too many friends — I don't know who half these people are,'" Dunbar says. "Somebody apparently said, 'Look, there's this guy in England who says you can't have more than 150.'"
Dunbar has found 150 to be the sweet spot for hunter-gatherer societies all over the world. From the Bushmen of Southern Africa to Native American tribes, a typical community is about 150 people. Amish and Hutterite communities — even most military companies around the world — seem to follow the same rule.
The reason 150 is the optimal number for a community comes from our primate ancestors, Dunbar says. In smaller groups, primates could work together to solve problems and evade predators. Today, 150 seems to be the number at which our brains just max out on memory.
But what does this all mean if you're not Amish — or the CEO of GORE-TEX?"
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