Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

by Bo Burlingham

our whole concept of what business is—has been shaped by publicly owned companies, which actually make up a small percentage of the entire business population, and by fast-growing technology ventures, which is an even smaller group. Virtually every mass-market business best seller, from Iacocca to In Search of Excellence to Good to Great, has concentrated on the people in and the practices of large public companies, or companies that aspire to be large and public. So, too, are those companies the focus of most major business magazines and newspapers, not to mention the business shows on television and radio, or the curricula of business schools.

The shareholders who owned the businesses I was looking at had other, nonfinancial priorities in addition to their financial objectives. Not that they didn’t want to earn a good return on their investment, but it wasn’t their only goal, or even necessarily their paramount goal. They were also interested in being great at what they did, creating a great place to work, providing great service to customers, having great relationships with their suppliers, making great contributions to the communities they lived and worked in, and finding great ways to lead their lives. They’d learned, moreover, that to excel in all those things, they had to keep ownership and control inside the company and, in many cases, place significant limits on how much and how fast they grew. The wealth they created, though substantial, was a byproduct of success in these other areas.