Good point, though the author does address that a bit in the epilogue:

Almost none of this applies to small companies. They are so small that the founders and the CEO actually do have a chance of fully understanding problems, which means they don't yet need to delegate decisions.

The transition from small to large insofar as it defines an executive's role happens pretty fast. I'd guess it should happen in as little as one quarter of a person's monkeysphere. Not many people would consider a 30-ish person organization to be "large".

I think you can still have quite a bit of understanding on the overall status of a 30 person company. The CEO has 4-5 direct reports, of which the biggest departments have 10 reports. The CEO can have a pretty good handle on what's going on overall, and people can know their departments damn well.

This stuff definitely starts coming into play at around ~100; then as a department head who's been there since the get-go, you might have 30 reports; on some topics you're an expert who should be directly involved, sometimes not...

The article has a section about this ("Epilogue: small companies")

> For small and quickly growing orgs, ie the majority audience here

Is there any data on this?