http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/03/17/go-corporate-or-go-home/

Into

If you’re in Silicon Valley, you might have missed the trend, but the percentage of American workers working for big companies has been increasing, even as corporate bureaucracy is getting more stifling. Strangely, this has been happening even as the companies issue press releases about being more flexible and adaptive, to compete with startups, as Paul Graham argues in his recent controversial essay on Refragmentation. But flexible seems to mean layoffs and reorgs into ever more complex and, yes, fragmented corporate structures. They aren’t slimming down into flexible startups.

Conclusion

So now I can repeat myself a bit more, and answer my original question succinctly why don’t companies stay flexible? It’s a necessary result of scaling up and the need for legibility to optimize large systems.
We’d love to have flexibility, but the cost is scale, integration, and profitability. For a startup to succeed, it needs to get past the phase where it can be fluid. This isn’t, of course, an iron law — but it’s a reason that we’re not seeing tech visionaries extrapolations borne out in the wider economy.
The math of complexity isn’t changing, and humans have cognitive limits. That means we need to accept that growth of companies post-startup phase will not be exponential, nor even linear, but logarithmic — scaling along with the legibility of a tree.