Book Review: Small Giants

If you’ve read Good to Great, Build to Last, or Mavericks at Work (my review), this book—Small Giants—is a natural continuation of the subject with a twist.

Whereas other similar books profile publicly traded companies, Small Giants focuses on privately-held ones who chose not to get acquired or go public and attempted to stay small. They didn’t want to give up their spirit, culture, service quality and other ingredients of the “mojo”, as Bo Burlingham calls it. This “mojo” does not survive acquisitions and IPOs, as owners of profiled companies sooner or later realized.

The book helps you evaluate why you’re in business, what you expect out of it, what to consider if it takes off, etc. Therefore I highly recommend this book to owners and employees of private businesses as well as to fledging entrepreneurs.

Below are some of my favorite quotes:

A “full range of pressures […] often cause entrepreneurs to lose control of their companies at an early stage, with the result that decisions about how much and how fast to grow wind up getting made for them. Only by overcoming those pressures can you preserve your ability to choose the kind of company you’ll have in the end.”

“Great customer service involves demonstrating to customers that you value their business and will go the extra mile to keep it. Enlightened hospitality means showing them that you care about them personally. You don’t want them just to be satisfied; you want them to be happy. It’s a step beyond service, and it requires the company to develop an emotional connection with customers through individual, one-on-one, person-to-person contacts.”

“The small giants also know those relationships are fragile. They depend on a level of trust and intimacy that’s easily lost. All it takes is a little neglect. […] 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.”