The Hundredth
Corporate Monkey

Popular culture speaks of the “100th monkey” effect in various aspects of human society, whereby some idea or ability suddenly becomes inherent in others after a threshold base population has first labored through the learning.

Regardless of whether you believe, whether the origin has been dismissed by its original author as metaphor taken for fact¹ or whether there is merit to the concept at all, the point is that others believe. It’s their belief that makes for an interesting exploration here.

Having been in and around a few high-tech startup companies since the 1990’s, there tends to be a rush to grow. The magic number seems to target 300+ employees as the ideal size for these young companies. Some are content after a mere hundred, plus a dozen or two. Others continue expanding beyond one thousand, but that could be in part due to the organization taking on a life of its own: internal fiefdoms and such.

(For what it’s worth, many of these software businesses would need only a handful of programmers to be successful, provided they use the right language and tools. But that’s a topic for another time.)

Upstart businesses generally have enough challenges in their early years simply due to being new. There is a learning curve in just about any direction one may look. From abiding by regulations to defining market share… From logistics of office space and infrastructure to establishing and nurturing the internal culture…

Two factors are highlighted. 1) Acquiring customers/investors involves getting people to understand what you do and what you offer. 2) Attracting customers/investors involves getting the word out.

This is where belief in the 100th monkey myth plays a role.

Again, you need not put much weight into it, but some do. Some– that’s all that matters for my point.

In the quest for customers and/or investors, if someone has difficulty recruiting and getting employees to comprehend, understand and ultimately believe in the product, how would there be any luck in acquiring those with money in hand?

There is work in hiring and in securing customers. There is work to be done in landing investors. But before each respective set of tasks becomes well understood for this particular company, every new individual encountered requires much more of the founder’s time than future ones.

On more than one occasion, I’ve heard the sigh of relief from founders and employees with single digit serial numbers as new people are hired. Each new staff member gives a material benefit to those who started earlier by reducing each person’s individual workload.

After a certain point, however, adding more employees introduces complexity. Introduction of organizational hierarchy and policies apparently become inevitable, which is yet another debatable issue for another time.

In some countries, there are additional legal requirements for companies with triple digit employee headcount.

The significance here is that in the race to 100, 300 or a thousand employees comes with an inherent price.

So there must be some ulterior motive.

One very possible motive I offer is that the founders believe in the hundredth monkey phenomenon.

Assuming the magic threshold is around 100, it’s safer to overshoot that number and insulate against non-believers in the organization, but is 110, 125 or 150 sufficient? Perhaps there are variations of the belief, such that a larger number magnifies the effect, in which case tripling becomes the safe bet.

With hordes of employees having drank the kool-aid (redbull), enough of them will have gone through the training, indoctrination and evangelism that by virtue of the hundredth corporate monkey coming into being, capturing investors and customers becomes easier.

Regardless of whether it works or whether this is attributed to the correct phenomena, successful entrepreneurs are said to live within their own reality, one in which their product/service is successful.

To that end, maybe the placebo effect playing here is simply this: Any ritual taken to heart exorcises enough of the self-deprecating daemons that the part² of one’s mind typically interfering is sufficiently occupied, so the true creative forces may render the intended outcome.

The question then remains whether or not to participate in someone else’s ritual or be master of one’s own.

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Notes:

1. References: Ron Amundson 1985 or summarized: Skeptic’s Dictionary

2. Incidentally, in buddhism, the busy mind is sometimes referred to as the monkey mind or less so, monkey brain.