I own a manufacturing company in Brazil called Semco, about which I can report the following curious fact: no one in the company really knows how many people we employ. When we walk through our manufacturing plants, we rarely even know who works for us. Some of the people in the factory are full-time Semco employees; some work for us part-time; some work for themselves and supply Semco with components or services; some work for themselves under contract to outside companies (even Semco’s competitors); and some of them work for each other. We could decide to find out which is which and who is who, but for two good reasons we never bother. First, the employment and contractual relationships are so complex that describing them all would take too much time and trouble. Second, we think it’s all useless information.
A version of this article appeared in the January–February 1994 issue of Harvard Business Review.