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Analyzing trends in leadership, company culture and the art of career building.
Analyzing trends in leadership, company culture and the art of career building.
Analyzing trends in leadership, company culture and the art of career building.
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Slice shops
It's not often we can herald the end of a corporate maxim. But it might be time to retire Jeff Bezos's famous "two-pizza rule," which was the Amazon founder's early-aughts way of saying that teams should be kept small enough that two pizzas could feed everyone.
The new maxim may be the two-slice rule. In 2026, it seems, the optimal team is so small that two slices should be enough, as Dan Shipper, CEO and cofounder of AI startup Every, recently put it. (Take note: "These are New York slices that you fold in half and eat standing at a counter," he specified.)
Executives' enthusiasm for tiny teams is suddenly everywhere. "It's essential to organize in small teams for super speed," JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon wrote in his annual shareholder letter, which was released this week.
"A significantly smaller team, using the tools we're building, can do more and do it better," Block CEO Jack Dorsey explained after he slashed 40% of the company's headcount.
And online leaderboards lionize the leanest startups, like Medvi, which purportedly expects to bring in $1.8 billion in revenue with one founder and a single employee.
There may come a point where the pursuit of drastic efficiency backfires, where maximizing revenue per employee looks less like a healthy goal than a vanity metric, and where companies that shrink teams to the vanishing point end up missing opportunities for growth. For now, the logic is that fewer people = fewer conversations = faster decisions. But research suggests things are more complicated than that.
Smaller teams often do move faster than larger ones because fewer people means less coordination drag. And studies point to diminishing returns as teams grow, with per-person productivity often slipping as headcount rises.
But one large study from researchers at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University found that while small teams are more likely to generate disruptive ideas, large teams are better at developing existing ones. And any management professor will tell you that if you push teams to deliver more than they're capable of with the resources they're given, they're bound to burn out. Once that happens, it will take a lot more than a pizza or two to get things back on track.
"People don't ascribe enough credit in their careers to luck."Jon McNeill
Former president, Tesla
The one-time lieutenant of Elon Musk's spoke with Businessweek about the life lessons in his new book, The Algorithm.
By the numbers
119
Average number of minutes US workers spend reviewing their options before changing medical plans during open enrollment, according to ADP's latest employee benefits survey.
What else we're reading
- The Women, Money & Power Report for elevating the perspectives of women leaders and experts shaping global finance
- Tech In Depth for analysis and scoops about the business of technology
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