Small Giants Quotes

“Success means you’re going to have better problems. I’m very happy with the problems I have now.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“If there’s one thing that every founder and leader in this book has in common with the others, it is a passion for what their companies do. They love it, and they have a burning desire to share it with other people. They thrive on the joy of contributing something great and unique to the world.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“I hear other people saying, ‘I can’t wait for my vacation.’ To me, it’s a lost day out of your life when you feel that way. It’s such a waste to be unhappy when you can wake up in the morning anticipating the day. Your work should be something you enjoy.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“The shareholders who own the businesses in this book have other, nonfinancial priorities in addition to their financial objectives. Not that they don’t want to earn a good return on their investment, but it’s not their only goal, or even necessarily their paramount goal. They’re also interested in being great at what they do, creating a great place to work, providing great service to customers, having great relationships with their suppliers, making great contributions to the communities they live and work in, and finding great ways to lead their lives. They’ve learned, moreover, that to excel in all those things, they have to keep ownership and control inside the company and, in many cases, place significant limits on how much and how fast they grow. The wealth they’ve created, though substantial, has been a byproduct of success in these other areas. I call them small giants.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to be Great Instead of Big

“Now I think my role is to make sure that everybody here gets the idea that we have a theme and to remind people what we’re up to and to set standards. . . . I’m actually a little embarrassed to talk about what I do because I love it so much and it’s such a sort of a selfish, quixotic kind of existence I have. But life is short, and if I thought we were being silly, and the beer was a joke, and it was all a con job, then I’d really be embarrassed about what I do. But I have so much fun and do such amazing things, I’m beginning to relax and enjoy it. Because I’m persuaded that the beer is so damn good.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“When contemplating our reader, he reminded us, we needed to take the whole person into account. “I always tried to tell the editors to think of the business person as an artist using both sides of his brain,” he said. “You’re not just writing for a rational person. You are writing for someone who has the soul of an artist, and his expression is business.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“Entrepreneurship, Bernie realized, was the means by which an economy continually renewed itself. Without it, a country would lose its vitality, its energy, and become impoverished—just as a culture would become impoverished without the ongoing creation of art. “I kept thinking that the entrepreneur is like an artist, only business is the means of his expression. . . .” he said. “He creates [a business] from nothing, just a blank canvas. It’s amazing. Somebody goes into a garage, has nothing but an idea, and out of the garage comes a company, a living company. It’s so special what they do. They are a treasure.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“give a credit. Or whatever else we think is best.” Like 140 or so of her fellow employees, Michelle was an owner of ECCO. She was a member of the employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) that controlled 58 percent of the company’s stock. When I met her, her stake was worth $12,000. More important, she felt like an owner and believed she was treated like one. She had a lot of direct contact with the CEO, Ed Zimmer. Among other things, he held a regular monthly lunch with all the people who had a birthday that month, and they talked about themselves and the company and whatever else they wanted to discuss.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“that speaks to the little secret behind the relationships that small giants have with their suppliers and customers. It’s generally not the people at the top of the organization who create the intimate bonds. It’s the managers and employees who do the work of the business day in and day out. They are the ones who convey the spirit of the company to the outside world. Accordingly, they are the company’s first priority—which, from one perspective, is ironic. For all the extraordinary service and enlightened hospitality that the small giants offer, what really sets them apart is their belief that the customer comes second.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“That’s their philosophy,” said Greder, whose day job was associate dean of students at Illinois Wesleyan. “Dance with the ones who brought you.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“I decided, was to look at the common threads among the companies I’d already identified as having mojo. First, I could see that, unlike most entrepreneurs, their founders and leaders had recognized the full range of choices they had about the type of company they could create. They hadn’t accepted the standard menu of options as a given. They had allowed themselves to question the usual definitions of success in business and to imagine possibilities other than the ones all of us are familiar with.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“Third, each company had an extraordinarily intimate relationship with the local city, town, or county in which it did business—a relationship that went well beyond the usual concept of “giving back.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“Second, the leaders had overcome the enormous pressures on successful companies to take paths they had not chosen and did not necessarily want to follow. The people in charge had remained in control, or had regained control, by doing a lot of soul searching, rejecting a lot of well-intentioned advice, charting their own course, and building the kind of business they wanted to live in, rather than accommodating themselves to a business shaped by outside forces.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“Danny Meyer of Union Square Hospitality Group talked about businesses having soul. He believed soul was what made a business great, or even worth doing at all. “A business without soul is not something I’m interested in working at,” he said. He suggested that the soul of a business grew out of the relationships a company developed as it went along. “Soul can’t exist unless you have active, meaningful dialogue with stakeholders: employees, customers, the community, suppliers, and investors. When you launch a business, your job as the entrepreneur is to say, ‘Here’s a value proposition that I believe in. Here’s where I’m coming from. This is my point of view.’ At first, it’s a monologue. Gradually it becomes a dialogue and then a real conversation.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“(1) steady gross margins that it protects; (2) a healthy balance sheet, as reflected in the current, cash-to-debt, and debt-to-equity ratios, among other measures; and (3) a sound business model governing how the company delivers value to customers and earns a profit in the process.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“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.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“Meyer was saying, in effect, that growth is important because it produces change, and change creates opportunities to do better, provided you recognize them. Ten years before, he hadn’t been looking for those opportunities because he had been focused on keeping the culture the same and feared that growth would inevitably lead to its dilution. What he’d learned was that the real threat to the culture was not dilution but stagnation, which could be avoided by taking advantage of the opportunities created by growth to continually improve the culture.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“We were doing a great job of attracting people based on what they thought our culture was, but when they got here, they found a discrepancy between what they expected and what they found.” The discrepancy could be traced back to about twenty-five long-tenured senior managers. For Meyer, that discovery was a revelation. “I’d always thought that success was about retention rates,” he said, “but it’s not. It’s about bringing the right people in and exiting the wrong people at the right time. In 2014 and 2015, a lot of these senior people left the company and were replaced by others we added with culture in the forefront of our minds.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“Union Square Hospitality Group is another example of a small giant that got both bigger and better. Aside from O.C.Tanner, no company from the original edition of this book grew as much as USHG in the following decade, and no owner had as great a change in philosophy as Danny Meyer. “Here is the headline of my life right now: trying to use growth as the engine to build our culture, which is completely the opposite of what I always feared—that growth would hurt our culture,” he said in 2015. “I have made a 180-degree turn. I now see that sensible, well-paced growth is essential to advance your culture. Because culture needs to grow. The worst thing you can do is to try and maintain culture.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“Somewhere on the rocky voyage from the garage to the fully managed organization, they get it backward. They begin to view the passion as something they can use to build the business. That may well be true, of course. The problem is, if you keep heading in that direction, you’ll eventually lose whatever it was that gave the company its mojo in the early days. Contributing something great and unique to the world will become less and less of a priority. By the time the second or third generation of owners takes over, there’s a good chance that the passion and the business will have gone their separate ways, and the company will have become just another income-producing property. If it’s acquired, it won’t be because the acquirer’s stockholders share the passion or believe in the mission (whatever the new management may say). They’ll want to own it only if they think it will improve their financial returns. People will work there mainly because they need a job. Customers will buy its products and services only if they offer the best value for the money. The company will be an economic mechanism and little more. Pretty much everything else will have been lost.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“To some people, it may seem a stretch to describe what Brodsky was doing as art, but there is obviously a kind of artistry involved in creating something out of nothing based on an ability to see what everyone else is missing. That is, after all, what artists do. In business as in art, moreover, the end result is an experience, and the quality of the experience reflects the relationships between the different participants, as well as the specific medium of expression. While entrepreneurs may rely on peripheral vision rather than artistic inspiration, it’s often hard to tell the difference between the two.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“Brodsky couldn’t accept the notion that an industry, any industry, was closed to new competition. He realized that if he was going to get anywhere in records storage, he would have to come up with an approach to the business different from that of the established records-storage providers. That meant using his peripheral vision, looking at the business this way and that until he saw something that everybody else was missing.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“For any competitive individual—and entrepreneurs are competitive by definition—it becomes quite tempting to chase after growth at a certain point in a company’s life. The financial indicators are, after all, the most convenient, and objective, measures of success available. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that if you’re maximizing growth, you’re also maximizing success. It feels like you’re winning, and who doesn’t like to win?”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“If you allow yourself to get distracted, if you stop working on whatever it is that ties you to the people you do business with, the intimacy will vanish, the trust will dissipate, and the bonds will erode. That can happen for many reasons. It usually happens, however, when a company’s leaders begin focusing on growth or financial return, not as by-products of a well-run business, but as goals to pursue for their own sake. And if you sell equity to people outside the company, you will probably have to start viewing them as goals to pursue for their own sake—because you will owe those people a good return on their investment. Hence, the small giants’ commitment to remaining private and closely held.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“you can’t measure the value of what a company does by looking at how big it is and how much profit it generates. A company’s record of growth and the consistency of its financial returns may tell you something about the skill of its management team, but they say little about whether or not the business is contributing anything great and unique to the world. Instead, the small giants focus on the relationships that the company has with its various constituencies—employees, customers, community, and suppliers. Why? Partly, no doubt, because the relationships are rewarding in and of themselves, but perhaps also because their strength reveals the degree to which people are inspired by the company, and its ability to inspire them is the best measure of how they perceive the value of what the company does. If they are as passionate about it as the founders and leaders, the financial results are likely to follow.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“It is hard to exaggerate what the company went through. It changed its strategy from selling products to providing customers with solutions. It changed its value proposition from offering beauty to improving return on investment (ROI). It changed its culture from top down to wide open. It changed the way it maintained quality from using audits to having process-based mechanisms. It changed its marketing philosophy from promoting what it made to creating what customers wanted. It changed its technology from a system built around an outmoded mainframe to one based on a state-of-the-art network.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“It was in this crucible that Murdock and his team reshaped the culture of O.C. Tanner. “We tweaked it,” he said. “We didn’t want to touch the core values—the integrity, the commitment to continuous improvement, the customer intimacy. Obert believed in truth, goodness, and beauty, and so did the rest of us. But we had to add some new values, like humility and learning. Those came from me because I didn’t know what to do.” Murdock also encouraged a level of debate that hadn’t gone on previously. “We got into a Hegelian dialectic. I wanted forces to clash so that synergy could emerge. Before, bad news would stay down, out of sight. I wanted a war of ideas, and no silos. Anyone could speak to anyone else.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“Recognizing the huge challenge that lay ahead, Murdock brought in a speaker to inspire the troops. A renowned rock climber named Todd Skinner, had been the first person ever to ascend a Himalayan peak called Trango Tower. “We needed a metaphor,” Murdock said. “Todd came and talked to us about how intimidating the peak looked from base camp as they started to sort their gear. He said they realized they could only climb it by getting on the wall.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“One of his first moves was to open the books to the managers. Up to that point, only a handful of them had known the company’s actual profitability. When the others looked at the numbers, they were shocked. They had thought the business was making a lot more money than it was. Murdock pressed them to ask basic questions about where O.C. Tanner was going. He brought fifty-three people together from all over the company and challenged them to define what business they were really in, what value they should be offering customers, and what changes they would have to make for the company to be the best at what it did. Out of the discussions came a consensus that O.C. Tanner had to transform itself from a service-award manufacturer into a company that helped customers set up and operate employee recognition programs. It was a major change in perspective, and it required the company to make a series of seven “strategic bets,” as Murdock called them: (1) embrace reality; (2) define the strategy; (3) get the right people in place; (4) get marketing into the company; (5) harness technology first; (6) change the culture; and (7) improve operations.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“So how do you convince people that fundamental changes are necessary when the old ways appear to be working so well? How do you arouse people to action when they feel comfortable with the way things are? And how do you overcome the reverence people have for their beloved founder, who had died in 1993? The company operated as it did because Obert Tanner wanted it to, and Obert had never been wrong. Why should anyone believe that this new guy, the lawyer, knew what he was doing? In fact, Murdock readily admitted that he wasn’t quite sure what to do about the problems he saw, but he had no doubt that something had to be done if the company’s success was to continue into the next century.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big