As the company grows, finance runs the company.

From a comment to a column by Megan McArdle. It doesn't really matter, but the column is Who Needs a Diploma to Be President?

I have never heard it put this way before but there is a ring of truth to it.

When a company is young, engineering runs the company. Then sales does. As the company grows, finance runs the company. Eventually, HR does. How you interact with one another and who you hire are all under HR's purview.

You should run hard and fast away from companies that are run by HR.

I think it is very rare that a company is actually "run" by HR but there are some whose corporate conversation becomes dominated by HR concerns. And those mostly face failure on the near horizon because HR rarely actually understands the business.

It is a pity because there are good ideas in HR and I am a firm believer in the importance of the culture of an organization. If you want to know what the potential of an organization is, good or bad, look at the culture, not at the policies. Regrettably, HR does not work with the same sort of motivating constraints as exist for engineers or salespeople. Without those constraints, there is little competition. Without competition, ideas that are theoretically good never get a chance to be banged around enough to be actually good.