Christopher Gonzalez An elaboration of one of the ideas I had bullet-pointed in my student planner for later use: When small businesses merge for mutual benefit, each boss still retains a sense of distinct corporate identity. The businesses still exist as themselves, but now they are sharing resources with similar bosses. Each boss is an expert in his chosen field and is the best person with whom to inquire when a problem in his field arises. Big problems tend to be a non-issue because such attention to detail is still alive; small, localized problems never snowball into anything larger. The trouble surrounding creation of heartless “big businesses” monopolies begins when new bosses usurp the positions of the old. These new bosses have no affiliation with the old way of doing things nor do they have any personal investment in preserving tradition. They see the merged businesses as a greater whole, a single entity with a single seat of power that each of the mini-bosses quickly seeks to steal for himself. When one finally wins, he is responsible for every matter in every department under his corporate umbrella. Naturally, nobody expects him to step down for even a moment from his place atop Olympus to speak with mortal man, so the only way to reach him is to present him with a very big, very worthy problem. Since big problems tend not to appear overnight, the people involved with them must suffer for an unnecessarily extended period of time while the problem grows from small and solvable to big and burdensome. Given the limited capacity for man to train himself to nigh-perfection in any particular realm of study, a vast bureaucracy of equally powerless experts may be wiser to promote than a consolidation of might under the neglected rule of a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none fool.