Sometimes it’s great to read books when they come out, sometimes it’s better to
wait. Having not read Small Giants before, I’m glad I waited until now to get
to it as the 10th anniversary edition packs in a lot of additional content.
Want to thank my boy Anton for recommending this book to me back in
December while hanging out in Mexico on a Sumo Retreat. Perfect segue into
mentioning that AppSumo and SumoMe are hiring for a variety of roles.
I’m so very fortunate to get to work on amazing things with a group of talented
folks that make me want to be a better me.
Okay, so back to the book. Small Giants is about companies that opted to be
great organizations instead of just throwing bodies at problems for the sake of
it. Sure the title already says that, but it really can’t be stressed enough.
Success can’t be measured by the number of of employees you have, especially if
everybody hates working there.
Like most books of this nature, there were some stories that were quite
compelling and others I could have really done without. The take away about most
of the companies is that they were predominately private companies and they
valued their employees as much, if not more than their customers.
Sure, you can be a behemoth like Google and still provide lunches and shit like
that for your employees. But at that scale do Larry and Sergey know everybody by
name? The fuck they do, and that’s what separates the great companies in this
book from the Googles and Facebooks of the world that just throw benefits at
employees.
With that said, staying small doesn’t necessarily make you great. What made
these companies great was the fact that they had founders that felt culture was
important. So much so that most of the companies that lost their founders lost
the soul and culture that made them great.
This was one of those books that I feel like I probably need to read it every
year or so just to make sure that I don’t forget the lessons. If you’ve read the
original and haven’t read the 10th anniversary edition, I’d highly recommend
picking it up.
Oh look, I made it easy, here’s a link:
