Product Description

Renowned academic and businesswoman Jill Bamburg shows how mission-driven entrepreneurs can preserve the values of their company while maintaining their growth and competitiveness in the marketplace. Through lessons and stories readers learn how to build growth businesses that can be successful and economically significant in the competitive marketplace. They will learn how their businesses can be strong global competitors without becoming bad local citizens.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #855469 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 174 pages

About the Author
Jill Bamburg worked in Senior Marketing Management at the Aldus Corporation in Seattle before becoming a distinguished faculty member at Antioch University in Seattle, WA and a highly successful marketing consultant. She currently serves as MBA Program Director at Bainbridge Graduate Institute where she heads curriculum development for a cutting edge MBA program in environmentally and socially responsible business.

Customer Reviews

Excellent Case Collection and Synthesis
I think the first reviewer missed the point (or several points) about this book. As the title indicates, the book *is* about "getting to scale" and growing beyond being "small" and "local." While she doesn't at all dismiss small and local businesses, these aren't the focus of her book. Maybe her next one will be, but this one isn't.

Any book that is a collection of case studies by definition leaves some examples out (like Whole Foods). Bamburg describes a wide range of companies, and it's impossible to compare them just based on the balance sheet or income statements. She provides the data available to give the reader a sense of the size of the enterprise. Where it's lacking, I'm betting it's because the company may be privately held and unwilling to make this information available. Not unusual at all.

"Small Giants" is a great book, and in my opinion, complimentary to Bamburg. In the same way that no company is "pure" from a sustainability point of view, it's not clear to me that 100% local businesses represent the solution to our problems. There are things that I need (and yes, want) that are not produced in my bioregion, and companies that have figured out a least-harmful way to procure these things for me are ones that I will support. And I'm betting many of these are companies that have "gotten to scale" in the way Ms. Bamburg writes.

This book isn't a manual, but a collection of example companies that have been successful, grown to a certain level of scale, and have not sacrificed the values and intentions they started out with. Are they perfect? No. Do some of them make things that I don't like? Absolutely. But I learned a lot from Bamburg's excellent book, and I think anyone interested in businesses that are attempting to tread lightly on the planet and treat people with respect and dignity should read it.

An Excellent Guideline
There has been a growing interest in socially responsible businesses. Many of them have been started by entrepreneurs who subsequently realized that in order to grow to their maximum potential that they would have to sell out to one of the mega-corporations. There are several reasons for this the most important of which is better access to capital and markets. The small company simply doesn't have the resources to last through a bad turn in the economy or to expand nation or world wide as rapidly as needed.

The author is dean of the MBA program at the Bainbridge Graduate Institute which offers programs focused on sustainable business. This is an unusual program since most MBA programs are oriented to train people to work as managers in huge companies.

In this book she identifies nine critical issues that must be managed well if a business is to grow yet preserve the independence desired by the founders.

Having formed such a business, I can tell you that her ideas are right on. Only that I would add one more factor - luck. You may be doing everything right when Hurricane Katrina comes to visit. All in all, an excellent book.

Bigger isn't always greener
The central premise of this book is that the larger the business, the more potential it has to "do good". It therefore seeks to describe a formula to grow a green business to scale without sacrificing environmental and social values. Small businesses and buy local movements are dismissed out of hand as inconsequential.

To illustrate this thesis, the author examines a number of carefully chosen businesses that best support it, showing how these companies have taken Other People's Money without sacrificing values. She leaves out a few obvious elephants in the room, most notably the publicly traded Whole Foods, which would directly contradict her thesis. She also includes a few companies that practice no discernable ethics of sustainability, including a toy manufacturer whose plastic products are made in China and sold to mass merchandisers. She lauds the company only because it has chosen not to make toy guns and claims, quite incorrectly, that no better example exists in the toy industry.

Further, the author withholds key information such as annual revenue for many of her profiled companies, reporting these numbers as N/A. Does this mean the company has no sales or simply didn't want to share them? In the case of a real estate firm, she reports a huge revenue amount, which seems to reflect the total value of the real estate the firm sold--hardly comparable to the total value of widgets that a manufacturing company sells. In both cases, her profiles provide little information and no context to compare these business to other similar businesses.

Laudable organizations like Co-Op America have been promoting this book as a how-to to create a viable sustainable business. In my opinion, our economy and our environment would be better served by well-run and sustainably-minded small businesses dedicated to thinking globally and acting locally. A better guide to creating a responsible and sustainable business is Bo Burlingham's "Small Giants", which argues the converse thesis, offering numerous detailed examples of companies that have made huge differences in their communities by choosing to remain small and perfecting their businesses at the local level.

Although Getting to Scale offers some interesting profiles of a few successful companies, it offers no real recipe for creating one, offers incomplete facts, and backs its argument with hand-picked case studies.
~dan