Scaling the Business Enterprise: Lessons from the Early Church

Abstract

Significant changes, whether at the organizational or social level, are effected only at scale. The early Christian church delivered perhaps the most remarkable scaling phenomenon in history, exhibiting tremendous resilience, resourcefulness, and capacity to leverage adversity. Adherents to the faith manifested the power of a simple vision that spawned a strong culture and elicited behaviors that delivered remarkable outcomes through networking, change management, and incentives mechanisms—lessons with broad beneficial implications for scaling nascent enterprises.