Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big, 10th-Anniversary Edition

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.

And what about the concept of “getting to the next level”? Although people use the phrase in different ways and different contexts, it always has something to do with major increases in sales—surely no one thinks that “the next level” involves having fewer sales—and there’s usually a management component as well. That is, you get to the next level

Because of their success, they find themselves faced with so many opportunities that it takes a conscious effort on their part to keep from heading off in the wrong direction.

competitors—or the fear of big competitors—as Erickson and Lisa

“For me, it was important to be part of something great and unique.

“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. Gradua

The companies I was looking for all operated on what you might call human scale, that is, a size at which it’s still possible for an individual to be acquainted with everyone else in the organization, still possible for the CEO to meet with new hires, still possible for employees to feel closely connected to the rest of the company.

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 g