Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big by Bo Burlingham is a book about small companies that want to be small, but also great. It details 14 small companies and goes in depth into the companies' histories, founders, and why and how these companies have decided to remain small companies rather than growing bigger.
The usual pattern for books of this type is to look at each company individually, generally with separate chapters. Small Giants takes a different approach. The book jumps around from one of the 14 companies to another to illustrate its points. This takes a little getting used to in the beginning when you aren't familiar with the companies yet, but after you get used to it, it works well.
The companies featured in the book are small companies, but with one exception they are bigger than a typical MicroISV. The smallest company has only two employees but the largest has more than a thousand.
The author chose only companies that had faced a decision where they could have decided to become a bigger company, either by going public, being acquired, or some other means. Each company made a choice to remain a small, private company.
The book details the decision to remain small and how each company works and succeeds. All of the companies are leaders in their industries, despite being small. It shows how passionate, focused companies can compete successfully against much larger competition. The culture of each company is described (and each company is different). It deals with the issue of succession when the founders leave the company (some companies have faced this already, others are planning for it, and some others haven't yet planned for it).
While the companies featured are generally larger than MicroISVs and are in completely different industries than independent game developers, there is a lot here that applies that will be of interest to indies or MicroISVs. A few of the companies, such as Righteous Babe Records, or Hammerhead Productions, a movie special effects company, are in intellectual property/development/publisher type industries and therefore face many of the same issues as indie game companies.
If you like reading about how small companies operate and are managed and how the people who run great small companies do it, then this is a must read book.
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