Doug Garnett wrote a blog post titled Complexity: Small Giants and the Myths of Growth (July 11, 2025).
« Many small, excellent companies thrive because they choose not to grow. »
« 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. »
« Opportunity to Pursue “Ineffable” Values. 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… The most important successes often involve things which cannot be clearly defined in advance. »
« Complexity makes [managers’] 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. »
“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, author of Small Giants: Companies That Choose to be Great Instead of Big
« 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 “the companies in this book were all deeply rooted in their communities, and it showed.” Such local results are inherently complex as “the companies shaped their respective communities, and the communities shaped them.” »
«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.” Burlingham suggests “it’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.” »
«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. »
“Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.” – Kenneth Boulding (1910-1993), economist, co-founder of General Systems Theory, and author of Economic Analysis (1948), The Skills of an Economist (1958), Beyond Economics (1968), Primer on Social Dynamics (1970), Economic Imperialism (1972), Social System of the Planet Earth (1977), Ecodynamics (1978), Evolutionary Economics (1981), The World as a Total System (1985), Structure of a Modern Economy: The United States 1929-1989 (1993), Illustrating Economics (2009).
Related:
“Small biz investors often miss that high growth means high working cap needs.” —Rick Nason, author of Rethinking Risk Management (2017), It’s Not Complicated (2017), and Small Business Finance and Valuation (2021).
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