Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad or an economist.
Kenneth Boulding

To an extraordinary degree, our view of business … 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.
Bo Burlingame

Powerful mythologies demand growth in business. These mythologies arrive from the truth that public companies and venture funded startups must grow. After all, public companies only keep shareholders and the press happy when they grow. And companies backed by venture capital enter compacts demanding dramatic growth to, once again, keep investors happy.

Though only around 1% of US companies are required to grow, their prominence has led a demand for growth to become a persistent and damaging mythology where the remaining 99% of companies are told they must “grow or die?”

This, though, is a mythology as growth is only one possible path to success as reality is far more nuanced.

Small Giants

During Bo Burlingham’s 30 years at Inc Magazine he was sometimes asked to write about companies which stayed small and thrived and this experience led to his unusual book Small Giants: Companies That Choose to be Great Instead of Big.

Burlingham’s encounters with small giants started with Zingerman’s Community of Businesses — an operation formed by the owners of Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Zingerman’s had been invited to “go national” but the owners refused the offer so they could focus on their value to Ann Arbor. Burlingham discovered many more small giants across a wide range of categories, geographies, and industries. In the book he focuses on a small group of companies who thrived apart from the mythological growth paths including Anchor Steam Brewing, Clif Bar & Co, ECCO, Reell Precision Manufacturing, Righteous Babe Records, and others.

Of course, these companies hide from our news feeds because they do not seek national news coverage (or even extensive local coverage). Partly, lacking shareholders, small giants don’t need coverage to support share price perceptions. Having introduced new products for many small giants I’ve also learned that news coverage can be a problem for these companies. It is rare that news coverage builds their businesses but such coverage always leads to large numbers of calls from hungry vendors (often including our competitors).

There is also a cultural and press bias against small giants. Most business writers find that stories about outstanding growth are more popular than stories about small giants. And, living within modern cultures, many writer’s have taken up the cultural belief that lack of growth is dangerous.

While superb small giants are found everywhere, they remain hidden from public awareness — a fact which appears to support “grow or die” mythology.

But…What IS Growth?

Within complexity science we discover a multi-dimensional understanding of “growth.” The growth mythology of business, though, is a one-dimensional idea including only revenues, profits, and company size. The Myth, then, is that “companies must grow big or they will die.”

Good things happen, though, when we open the idea of growth to be far broader. Humans, for example, all need growth of some type for mental health. There are, though, more satisfying ways to grow than only by turning a company of 15 into a company of 1,500.

A demand for always growing bigger, though, is often justified by the idea that employees need growth. It IS true that employees need growth paths. All managers know the danger of critical employees feeling they can no longer grow within a company. The growth employees need, though, must fit their life path and that growth only rarely comes from a company becoming big as only some employees grow well by “managing more” people. Most employees grow best along paths of job, industry, category, and interest. Thus, for example, some will want expanded project responsibilities, to lead investigations, to apply their talents in new ways, to explore new areas of talent, and more. And, of course, growth in income is required along the way.

Complexity makes manager lives more challenging. While each employee is responsible for their own life, the choices they make affect our companies. Whole realities of growth, then, intertwine companies with employees, vendors, customers, markets, distribution channels, and more. Thus, as these active elements in business adapt the company must also adapt.

The Decision: To Grow, or Not to Grow

Businesses must, then, choose their relationship with growth while accepting that their choices thrive within their own uniquely complex world of interacting and adapting parts.

That leads us to a list of principles around growth including some paradoxical truths:

• If a company wants to grow in size it must add employees without hurting operations. Among many things, this requires the right employees can be found as adding other types of employees quite quickly damages a company’s business.
• A choice to become bigger requires investment yet good and bad arrives with every investment.
• Good employees need ways to grow in their careers through responsibility, salary, and a great deal more.
• Companies reach points where they cannot grow incrementally but only in dramatic jumps. One company Burlingham discusses reached a point where growth required doubling its output and sales. This company chose NOT to take the path as they knew it would destroy much which mattered in the company.
• There is no reason to believe growing revenue, profit, and size will satisfy employees. In fact, the opposite is often truth — that demands for growth also damage employee growth paths.
• Large growth requires outside investors and outside investors always change companies. The companies Burlinham studied mostly decided they “couldn’t have outside shareholders…to build a small giant.”[3]
• Few business models help companies envision a path choosing not to grow. This makes the choice not to grow seem more uncertain.
• Planning for growth can seem a straight-forward while the risks in growth are hidden and difficult to summarize. Choosing to grow is not a reliable path to a healthy future as the choice involves serious risks while also making certain rewards possible.

The Cultural Demand for Growth

Businesses also face a potent cultural pressure which demands growth. Nearly everyone a business owner contacts — neighbors at parties, other businessmen and women, families, banks, consultants, business trainers, and more — reinforces the idea that companies which aren’t growing must be unsuccessful. Thus, “a growing business” is seen as a proxy for “healthy business” even though the graveyards of business are filled with companies who grew themselves into bankruptcy and the library of acquired companies is filled with examples of acquisition killing the acquired company instead of helping it reach new heights.

Yet the choice not to grow big remains so unusual that any businessman or woman choosing to thrive without being big often finds that friends, neighbors, acquaintances, bankers, consultants, and others ignore this success in a type of cultural shunning. This type of shunning is a preferred sanction because it is indirect while it helps those embracing norms feel superior.

Culturally the demand for growth is built and strengthened by the newsfeed bias noted above. And, yet, many small, excellent companies thrive because they choose not to grow.

Opportunity to Pursue “Ineffable” Values[4]

A particularly odd result of the modern growth fetish is that it ignores the free market necessity for business owners to enjoy creating things of value to customers and society. No matter what fantasies might surround someone starting a company, the best satisfaction in life and business comes from creating companies whose whole value matters — and sometimes those companies grow big or are widely recognized. Fortunately, society benefits when owners create whole companies whose value includes profits. They are, after all, small businesses which thrive over time, provide good jobs for employees, deliver goods and services which matter to customers, and do this in ways satisfying owners while delivering enough profit that they thrive in life.

Complexity science shows that business success is a whole result which emerges as vast numbers of parts interact and adapt. Such whole results, though, are also difficult to fully anticipate or even discuss at a given point in time. Despite how businesses are demanded to seek logical, clear goals that’s not how success arrives. The most important successes often involve things which cannot be clearly defined in advance.

We find a focus on whole results with Burlingham’s small giants as they were “searching for something indefinable and immeasurable, something that went beyond the standard definitions of success in business.”[5] This led them to a quandary as funding inherently arrives with limitations. Thus, small giants generally rejected offers of capital as “the capital usually comes at too high a price.”[6] Once, again, investment is a two-edged sword often of extraordinary value but always accompanied by serious compromises.

Most of his small giants chose not to have outside shareholders. Those few who accepted investment did so only when they were certain the investors fully supported their search for their indefinable and immeasurable something.

Company owners should reject paths, no matter how possibly profitable, if those paths would change the inherent nature of what they value in the business. Company owners, after all, are responsible not only for profit but the company’s whole result. Cultural forces, though, present owners a serious challenge — “[e]ven if he knows in his heart of hearts …that the growth may transform the company in ways he can’t foresee and may not like, he still can’t bring himself to turn business away.”

The Competitive Advantage of Locality and Terroir

Small giants discover a competitive advantage inaccessible to large companies by embracing locality in defiance of national blandness. Burlingham notes “[t]he companies in this book were all deeply rooted in their communities, and it showed.”[7] Such local results are inherently complex as “[t]he companies shaped their respective communities, and the communities shaped them.”[8]

An interesting way to view the influence of such locality is found in the French culinary idea of terroir — “the combination of factors including soil, climate, and sunlight that gives wine grapes their distinctive character.”[9] Burlingham suggests “[i]t’s the same with some businesses. Every community has its own character, which is a sort of a spiritual terroir. If you’re really rooted in that community, it’s going to have a big impact on the way you are.”[10]

Companies expanding dramatically lose any terroir they might have built. While traditional business ideas reject any value of terroir out of hand, a human reality is that society needs such a result from some businesses.

Find the Small Giants In Your Area 

A critical first step for anyone involved in business is to become aware of the potent small giants around us. To start I recommend reading Burlingham’s — a book I only discovered when Tom Peters noted it in a Twitter discussion of unknown successes.

We must also build our own lists of small giants. My list includes many local hardware stores starting with McGuckin Hardware of Boulder, CO which has thrived despite both big box hardware chains locating stores within a mile. In Portland, OR Powell’s Books thrives locally and remains locally owned. Another interesting company is Trek Bicycles of Waterloo, WI which, while large, remains private and a major force in the bicycle industry.

No Profit Arrives Unaccompanied

We must do business in ways leading to profit. No profit arrives alone but is always accompanied by other things including qualitative realities might be morally unacceptable. Companies choosing growth at all costs, then, ensure their profit arrives with guests unwelcome within the company, its employees, their communities, and society as a whole.

My support of small giants is not based on some Jeffersonian small farmer mythology as there is no inherent goodness in a company which is small — growth is neither always right nor always wrong. Thus, while I’m a fan of local coffee shops I also love how Starbucks grew while continuing to deliver exceptional whole value. Society benefits, though, when growth is seen as a choice.

Support networks around business, unfortunately, are one-dimensional and poorly trained to help companies thrive while small. I’ve been particularly disappointed by the network of mentorship programs in the US as their goal is not healthy businesses — but businesses seeking to become big. It takes tremendous courage to be a small giant as such companies must fend for themselves.

Until next time be well. And take time to enjoy making smart choices about growth which best fit your situation. We should do business, after all, to enjoy what we do.

©2025 Doug Garnett — All Rights Reserved

Through my company, Protonik LLC, I consult with companies as they design and bring to market new and innovative products. I am writing a book exploring the value of complexity science for driving business success. Protonik also produces marketing materials including documentaries, websites, and blogs. As an adjunct instructor at Portland State University I teach marketing, consumer behavior, and advertising.

You can read more about these services and my unusual background (math, aerospace, supercomputers, consumer goods & national TV ads) at www.Protonik.net. Roughly once a month, Shahin Khan and I discuss current issues in marketing on our podcast The Marketing Podcast available on Google, Spotify, the OrionX website, and Apple Podcast. 

[1] Small Giants, Companies That Choose To Be Great Instead of Big, Bo Burlingham, page xvi

[2] Small Giants, Companies That Choose To Be Great Instead of Big, Bo Burlingham, page 37

[3] Small Giants, Bo Burlingham, page 34

[4] “Ineffable” is used to imply results so potent that they are hard to describe — currently beyond description.

[5] Small Giants, Bo Burlingham, page 34

[6] Small Giants, Companies That Choose To Be Great Instead of Big, Bo Burlingham, page 34

[7] Small Giants, Companies That Choose To Be Great Instead of Big, Bo Burlingham, page 52

[8] Small Giants, Companies That Choose To Be Great Instead of Big, Bo Burlingham, page 51

[9] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/terroir  11/7/2023

[10] Small Giants, Companies That Choose To Be Great Instead of Big, Bo Burlingham, pp 51-52