Bo Burlingham

Bo Burlingham is an American business journalist and editor who spent more than two decades at Inc. magazine, serving as editor-at-large. He is best known for Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big (2005, 10th-anniversary edition 2016), a study of businesses that deliberately chose depth and excellence over growth and scale. He has also co-authored books with Jack Stack and Norm Brodsky.

Burlingham’s work is grounded in the journalistic tradition rather than the academic one. He is not a management consultant or business school professor — he is a careful observer and chronicler of entrepreneurial businesses, and his framework emerges from extensive firsthand contact with the companies he studies rather than from statistical analysis of large datasets.

The Small Giants Discovery

The research behind Small Giants began with a puzzle: Burlingham encountered companies that had extraordinary reputations, loyal employees, devoted customers, and deep community connections — yet had chosen not to pursue the growth that their success made possible. Why?

“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 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.”

This observation challenged the default assumption that the goal of every business is to maximize growth. Burlingham found companies that had made a different and conscious choice — and were producing better outcomes by most measures that actually mattered to their stakeholders.

The Five Defining Characteristics

Through his research, Burlingham identified five qualities that distinguished the small giants from conventional businesses:

1. Recognition of the full range of choices

“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.”

Most founders implicitly accept the growth imperative without questioning it. Small giant founders had interrogated this assumption and made deliberate choices about what kind of company they wanted to create.

2. Resisting external pressure to grow

“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.”

The pressures to grow come from everywhere — employees who want advancement opportunities, customers who want more capacity, competitors who are scaling, investors who want returns. Resisting these pressures requires not just clarity about what you want but the organizational structures that make resistance possible (particularly equity control).

3. Extraordinary community intimacy

“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.‘”

The small giants were not merely charitable — they were genuinely embedded in their communities in ways that shaped their identity and their business model. This was not marketing; it was a fundamental aspect of how they understood their purpose.

4. Intimate customer and supplier relationships

“Fourth, they cultivated exceptionally intimate relationships with customers and suppliers, based on personal contact, one-on-one interaction, and mutual commitment to delivering on promises.”

The intimacy of these relationships was both a consequence of staying small and a constraint on growth. You cannot have deeply personal relationships with customers at massive scale. The choice to remain small enabled the relationships; the relationships reinforced the choice to remain small.

5. Unusually intimate workplaces

“Fifth, the companies also had what struck me as unusually intimate workplaces. They were, in effect, functional little societies that strove to address a broad range of their employees’ needs as human beings—creative, emotional, spiritual, and social needs as well as economic ones.”

The “Mojo” Concept

Burlingham introduces the concept of mojo — the quality that makes people want to be part of a company, analogous to personal charisma:

“The company is cool because what’s going on inside it is good, it’s fun, it’s interesting, it’s something you want to be associated with. From that perspective, mojo is more or less the business equivalent of charisma.”

Mojo comes from a combination of higher purpose (the work matters and the company knows why), intimate relationships with stakeholders, and genuine passion from leadership:

“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.”

The threat to mojo is not primarily external competition — it is internal diffusion of focus:

“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.”

The Business Model Imperative

Despite its emphasis on values and relationships, Small Giants includes a hardheaded financial argument. Small giants are not charities — they need to be financially sound:

“When you are out of cash, the greatest culture in the world won’t save you.”

“I concluded that to be successful over the long term, the company has to have and maintain: (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.”

Burlingham’s case studies include companies that failed — not from lack of values or relationships but from sound business model failures. The small giant model requires both the culture and the economics to work simultaneously.

Relationship to Company of One

Burlingham’s small giants are organizational-scale versions of Paul Jarvis’ company of one philosophy. Both challenge the growth imperative; both celebrate excellence over size; both argue that intimate relationships with customers and deep purpose are more durable competitive advantages than scale. The key difference: small giants typically have employees and organizational complexity; companies of one are structured to avoid both.

Key Book

Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big (2005, 10th-anniversary edition 2016) — Profiles 14 companies that chose excellence over size, examining what drove those choices, how they maintained them under pressure, and what the consequences were. The anniversary edition adds reflections on what happened to the original companies in the decade after publication.

Related Concepts and Authors

• company-of-one — Jarvis’s framework is the individual-scale version of the small giants philosophy
• jim-collins — Collins’ “right people on the bus” concept is explicitly applied in small giants research
• hedgehog-concept — Collins’ hedgehog is the strategic clarity that small giants achieve
• paul-jarvis — Jarvis takes the small giants philosophy to its individual-scale limit