Lausanne World Pulse – Learning from Ants: Missionary Teams and the Pyramid Model
By Justin Long
Perhaps, rather than constructing a “skyscraper” agency, we should build several “pyramids”—moderately large agencies, each with its own particular niche to fill. If a typical agency has about one thousand workers, we would likely need between forty and eighty such agencies.
At present, about a dozen agencies with more than one thousand workers each exist. Some of these include the Baptist Bible Fellowship, WorldVenture (formerly CBInternational), Child Evangelism Fellowship, Nigeria’s Evangelical Missionary Society, the Friends Missionary Prayer Band in India, the modern Overseas Missionary Fellowship and WEC International. These typically have budgets between US$10 million and US$100 million. So for this scenario, to reach our goal of forty-three thousand teams, we would need about five times as many agencies as presently exist, each capable of raising over US$10 million.
One Example: Dell
Is it possible to build small niche organizations rapidly? There are several examples in the for-profit world. In the technology industry, there are a few good case studies of companies that have formed recently and enjoyed explosive growth. One in particular has grown to become the 88th largest company in the world. It owes much of its success to its singular focus and its ability to work fast, measure its progress and create opportunities. The company: Dell.
Dell is an American computer hardware company founded by Michael Dell in 1984. It became one of the five hundred largest companies in the world just eight years later. Today, it employs sixty-three thousand people worldwide and manufactures more computers than any other company in the world. It maintains assembly plants in Canada, China, Ireland, Malaysia and the United States. It is looking to open plants in other countries, including India. It has US$55 billion in annual revenue.
Dell has taken “just-in-time” delivery to an extreme. It focuses on one thing: selling computers. It takes orders via its Internet websites and by telephone (averaging one order every twenty seconds). Its suppliers’ base is near Dell’s assembly plants. Within ninety minutes, needed parts are brought to Dell’s plant. Within four hours, Dell has merged the parts into a finished computer and shipped it out the door.
Dell strives to perfect this supply chain. It carries no inventory; it does not build a computer that has not already been bought and paid for. Further, its assembly lines and supply chain are one of the fastest, most efficient organizations in the world. According to the November 2004 article, “Living in Dell Time” in Fast Company, “Eleven years ago, Dell carried twenty to twenty-five days of inventory in a sprawling network of warehouses. Today, it has no warehouses. And though it assembles nearly eighty thousand computers every twenty-four hours, it carries no more than two hours of inventory in its factories and a maximum of just seventy-two hours across its entire operation.”
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