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Get your mojo working
By Woody Huizenga | January 19, 2009
I have difficulty staying out of bookstores. Call it a weakness. So last summer, when Kathleen and I were on vacation, I found myself browsing the shelves of a Borders in Clifton Park, New York. And I stumbled across Small Giants, by Bo Burlingham.
I’d never heard of either the book or the author, but I read it cover-to-cover. (I know. There is no other way to read a book. But I’m sure you take my point.) I was so impressed I bought a copy for my business partner, Mitchell. He, too, was impressed, and we ended up ordering another eight copies for the office.
What excited us about Small Giants? We are the owners of a small company, which we’d like to grow into a much bigger one. And we want to keep the qualities that make The Conference Publishers more than just another business. In short, we want it all.
In a similar vein to Burlingham’s book, Jim Collins’ Good to Great was an excellent read, but as someone not setting out to build the next industrial mega-corporation, I found the message to have limited applicability. On the other hand, the subtitle of Small Giants—Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big—really spoke to me.
Burlingham tells the stories not of companies that grew up to be enormous corporations, distant from and often unrecognizable to their founders, but of 14 firms “with larger ambitions than getting as big as possible as fast as possible.” The founders are almost always still on the scene, and the owners are always in control. The firms range in size from two employees to 1,900. And you probably haven’t heard of any of them.
What makes them special? Burlingham is a fan of blues singer Muddy Waters, and he quotes one of Waters’ best-known songs, Got My Mojo Working, describing “mojo” as the defining quality of a small giant.
Mojo, he says, is the combination of creativity, persistence, community spirit, innovation, passion, and (perhaps most important) great, intimate relationships with customers, suppliers, and employees.
And why would anybody want to build a company that was too big to have mojo?
Topics: Business Issues, Virtual Meetings |
Comments Feed
January 26th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
Thanks for the tip on the book Small Giants. I will go and check it out.
Tim