The Synergy Equation

To build any successful business you need to have great cooperation. When everyone is putting forth their best effort together, in unison, it's quite magical and you can feel the synergistic energy. I believe it's an exponential benefit where E=p^(n-m) where E is total energy, p is the energy for one person, n is the number of people who are working together, m is the number of people not helping. For the simple example of a sole proprietorship you have E=p^(1-0)=p. For another example, E=p^(5-0)=p⁵, where all 5 people are working collectively. The last example is very representative of my last job, E=p^(5-9)=p^-4.

To further exemplify this relationship we can substitute a numeric value of 10 for p. So for the sole proprietorship we get E=10. The next example we get E=10⁵ = 100,000 which is a huge amount of energy for just 5 people. In the last example we get E=10^-4 = 0.0001 which is much less than even the single proprietor value of 10. A value of 0.0001 pretty much sums up how I felt last year. Just a few of us worked our collected asses off trying to design and debug our product. There was a larger proportion of 9 people also working on the project who were putting in effort but not nearly the same level or interest as we were. A very difficult work environment indeed.