“answer a questionnaire” In response to a fact-checking email, Baron wrote that the sources they turned to exceeded just the San Jose Mercury News: “We scoured a variety of sources, including the ‘Merc,’ to try to identify evidence of new foundings. That was supplemented by industry listings from companies like CorpTech (which focuses on marketing targeted to small tech companies). From these sources we put together listings of companies by subsector (biotechnology, semiconductors, etc.). Then we sampled from those listings, seeking to get a representative sampling of firms in terms of age, venture-backed versus not, etc. Somewhat later, after ‘the Internet’ had emerged as a discernible sector, we replicated the research design focusing specifically on that sector, to see if things were similar or different among the new net companies from the others that we had been studying, and we found the patterns were the same.”
close to two hundred firms James N. Baron and Michael T. Hannan, “The Economic Sociology of Organizational Entrepreneurship: Lessons from the Stanford Project on Emerging Companies,” in The Economic Sociology of Capitalism, ed. Victor Nee and Richard Swedberg (New York: Russell Sage, 2002), 168–203; James N. Baron and Michael T. Hannan, “Organizational Blueprints for Success in High-Tech Start-Ups: Lessons from the Stanford Project on Emerging Companies,” Engineering Management Review, IEEE 31, no. 1 (2003): 16; James N. Baron, M. Diane Burton, and Michael T. Hannan, “The Road Taken: Origins and Evolution of Employment Systems in Emerging Companies,” Articles and Chapters (1996): 254; James N. Baron, Michael T. Hannan, and M. Diane Burton, “Building the Iron Cage: Determinants of Managerial Intensity in the Early Years of Organizations,” American Sociological Review 64, no. 4 (1999): 527–47.
collected enough data In response to a fact-checking email, Baron wrote: “Perhaps this is nit-picking, but what we were looking at were firms whose founders had similar cultural ‘blueprints’ or premises underlying their creation. I emphasize this because we were not using observable practices as the basis for differentiation, but instead the way in which founders thought and spoke about their nascent enterprises.”
one of five categories There were also a sizable number of firms that did not fit neatly into any of the five categories.
“on the same path” In response to a fact-checking email, Baron said that he should not be considered an expert on Facebook, and that participants in the study were promised anonymity. He added: “We found that engineering firms fairly frequently evolved, either into bureaucracies or into commitment firms. Those transitions were much less disruptive than others, suggesting that one reason for the popularity of the engineering blueprint at start-up is that it is amenable to being ‘morphed’ into a different model as the firm matures.”
“?‘You get paid,’?” Baron said Baron, in response to a fact-checking email, said that the bureaucratic and the autocratic models have differences but are similar in that “(1) they are both quite infrequent within this sector among start-ups; and (2) they are both unpopular with scientific and technical personnel.”
successful companies in the world The researchers promised confidentiality to companies that participated in the study, and would not divulge specific firms they had studied.
culture came through James N. Baron, Michael T. Hannan, and M. Diane Burton, “Labor Pains: Change in Organizational Models and Employee Turnover in Young, High-Tech Firms,” American Journal of Sociology 106, no. 4 (2001): 960–1012.
California Management Review Baron and Hannan, “Organizational Blueprints for Success in High-Tech Start-Ups,” 16.
“strong advantage” In response to a fact-checking email, Baron expanded upon his comments: “What this doesn’t explicitly capture is that commitment firms tended to compete based on superior relationships with their customers over the longer term. It is not just relationships with salespeople, but rather that stable teams of technical personnel, working interdependently with customer-facing personnel, enable these companies to develop technologies that met the needs of their long-term customers.”
“viability of the Company” Steve Babson, ed., Lean Work: Empowerment and Exploitation in the Global Auto Industry (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995).
preserve their jobs In a fact-checking email, Jeffrey Liker wrote that Toyota’s head of human resources had told a UAW representative that “before laying off any workers they would insource work, then management would take a payout and then they would cut back hours before considering layoffs. In return he said the union needed to agree on three things: 1) competence would be the basis for workers advancing, not seniority, 2) there had to be a minimum of job classifications so they had the flexibility to do multiple jobs, and 3) management and the union would work together on productivity improvements. Within the first year the Chevy Nova was not selling well and they had about 40% too many workers and they kept them all employed in training and doing kaizen for several months until they could get the Corolla into production.”
Harvard researchers wrote Paul S. Adler, “Time-and-Motion Regained,” Harvard Business Review 71, no. 1 (1993): 97–108.
shared power It is important to note that, despite NUMMI’s success, the company was not perfect. Its fortunes were tied to the automotive industry, and so when overall car sales declined, NUMMI’s profits dipped as well. The NUMMI factory was more expensive to operate than some low-cost foreign competitors, and so there were stretches when the firm was undersold. And when GM tried to export NUMMI’s culture to other plants, they found, in some places, it wouldn’t take. Enmities between union leaders and managers were simply too deep. Some executives refused to believe that workers, if empowered, would use their authority responsibly. Some employees were unwilling to give GM the benefit of the doubt.