W.L. Gore capped plants at 200 and built new ones instead of expanding

Gore & Associates was launched in 1958 from Bill and Vieve Gore's basement, and grew fast on demand for its insulated wiring and later Gore-Tex fabric. Most manufacturers meet that kind of demand the obvious way: expand the plant, add a management layer, add another. Gore's management model deliberately had none of that — no titles, no chain of command, just direct working relationships and mutual obligation between 'associates.'

That model has a size limit built in: a person can only hold that many direct relationships in their head. Company histories put the practical threshold at around 200 people per site — past it, associates stopped recognizing each other, cliques formed, and the peer-accountability system associates relied on instead of managers quietly stopped working. Popular retellings often round this to 150, tying it to later research on the cognitive limits of stable group size; Gore's own record puts the first split at 1967, Flagstaff.

Capped each plant at 200 people and opened new plants instead of expanding, preserving the size where direct relationships work.

Direct peer accountability breaks past ~200 people, so capping preserves it.

New plants replicate the culture, avoiding hierarchy that would dilute trust.

Trading scale economies for intact coordination keeps the flat model viable.

When your edge is direct trust, treat its size limit as a hard ceiling and replicate the unit rather than scale it.

By the mid-1980s Gore ran 29 small plants and 4,200 employees rather than a handful of sprawling ones; by 1993, over 40 plants and roughly 6,000 workers, still without traditional titles — a flat, low-turnover culture management writers now discuss alongside research on human group-size limits.