The linear extrapolation then would predict that the larger a company the more profitable it becomes. For non-linear, complex systems, however, it is known that in general there exists an optimal size of the system given by constraints in terms of flow of information and resources. With the advent of global communication systems and the Internet those constraints continue to weaken and truly global organizations have an evolutionary advantage.
In traditional thermodynamics intrinsic properties of systems are studied and boundaries are considered to be a perturbations that can be eliminated by taking the limit of infinitely large systems. From complex systems it is known, however, that this approach is not very useful since complex systems typically do a have intrinsic spatial scales, one of them being their overall size and the size of their environment. For any terrestrial system the size of planet earth itself is a limiting factor. Since modern economic and organizational systems are reaching global scales interactions with boundary effects become increasingly important. From a different perspective the Club of Rome in their "Limits of growth" studies has discussed this in great details. While their forecasting tools were fairly simple systems dynamics models, progress both in computational power of computers and in the understanding of non-linear, complex systems allow us today to have a more discriminating alternatives besides unlimited growth and "doom and gloom".