Gore did some counting, and realized that after putting about 150 people in the same building, things at GORE-TEX just did not run smoothly. People couldn't keep track of each other. Any sense of community was gone.

So Gore made the decision to cap his factories at 150 employees. "Whenever they needed to expand the company," Dunbar says, "he would just build a new factory. Sometimes right on the parking lot next door."

by NPR Staff

GORE-TEX, the company that makes wetsuits, hiking boots and ponchos, is the subject of a famous anecdote in the world of sociology. It centers on the guy who founded the company, Bill Gore.

"When Bill Gore set the company up, he set it up in his backyard," Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary anthropology at the University of Oxford, tells NPR's Rachel Martin.

From its modest beginnings, GORE-TEX grew and grew, Dunbar says, until Gore opened up a large factory. That, too, continued to grow.

Then one day, Dunbar says, Gore walked into his factory.

"And he simply didn't know who everybody was."

Gore wondered why this was. "It was his gut instinct," Dunbar says, "that the bigger a company got, people working for the company were much less likely to work hard and help each other out."

Gore did some counting, and realized that after putting about 150 people in the same building, things at GORE-TEX just did not run smoothly. People couldn't keep track of each other. Any sense of community was gone.

So Gore made the decision to cap his factories at 150 employees.

"Whenever they needed to expand the company," Dunbar says, "he would just build a new factory. Sometimes right on the parking lot next door."

Things ran better this way, Gore realized. In smaller factories, Dunbar says, "everybody knew who was who. Who was the manager, who was the accountant, who made the sandwiches for lunch."

Business was never better. One-hundred fifty, it seemed, was a magic number.

The Truth About Your Facebook Friends

Most of Dunbar's research has focused on why the GORE-TEX model was a success. That model is based on the idea that human beings can hold only about 150 meaningful relationships in their heads. Dunbar has researched the idea so deeply, the number 150 has been dubbed "Dunbar's Number." READ MORE and LISTEN TO THE RADIO STORY

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