Most of you know that along with being an entrepreneur, I am also a college student (if you are curious, I am doing my engineering degree in Information Technology). A few days ago my college decided to nominate me as the Microsoft Student Partner and one of my responsibilities would be to co-ordinate all Microsoft events and contests in our college and a few others.

One of the ideas which I recommended to the Microsoft Official, who I am directly dealing with, was to start an eNewsletter in my college. He showed interest in it so I discussed it with my College Department’s Head and he gave me a green signal to not only start an ‘official’ newsletter but also a forum and blog in my college.

But I couldn’t do it all alone as I also have a business to manage so I asked if I could go ahead and create a team which would help me in all this? Sure, no problem. I arrange for a notice to be put up on all the notice boards and personally make announcements in each class about it.

I don’t think I need to talk about the kind of response I got (the word Microsoft is enough to get most people orgasmic here in India) but the scary part was that I was asked to take up a core-team of 7 people.

Yikes! I absolutely loathe having more than 3 people in one team. Being a smartass that I am, I took two kind of people — who were great at management and who were great at technology. What this allowed me to do was to further split the core team into two teams of 3 and 4 people each with a clear different set of responsibilities. Problem solved.

But the reason why I am making this post is to talk about — Why Small Teams are MUCH better than Large Teams. Here we go –

1. A LOT Better Communication. To say that you need superb communication within a team would be perhaps an understatement. You actually need to have your minds working on same frequency to get the best results. To be honest, the more the number of people the more difficult it is to accomplish this.

2. Direct Responsibility. If you are working with just two other people who you know well — their habits, their strong points, their weak points etc. — then it becomes a lot easier to identify who is best suited for what and give him or her the direct responsibility.

Here’s a fact for you — unless someone is directly responsible for accomplishing something you can’t get anything accomplished. Period.

Also, it is very difficult (if not impossible) to play the blame game in a small team.

3. No Politics. Grr! Everyone hates it. It becomes very easy to weed out the rotten apple within a small team and keep the work environment great.

4. Consensus Never Works. Okay, this may be a bit of an overstatement but it is truth nevertheless. You can never get everything done by consensus and in the end you will need to make a decision and have everyone follow it. Now re-read my point 1, 2 and 3.

5. Less Wastage of Time. The more the merrier is the party. However, the exact opposite is true for work — the lesser the number of people, the better the communication between them and, as a result, they have to waste less time convincing people (who would probably never do anything related to the point on hand) to join the consensus.

What this means is that they can end up doing more work in less time!

Bottom line is — Just like Jeff Bezos (who makes sure that there are no more than four people in any team at amazon.com), I never create or work with large teams. And, I don’t mind twisting the rules to do what I want to.