NotitiesSmall Giants
Bo Burlingham
Het boek "Small Giants" van Bo Burlingham onderzoekt het idee van aandeelhouderswaarde en benadrukt dat bedrijven met aandeelhouders die niet alleen financiële doelen hebben, ook gericht zijn op uitstekende prestaties, goede werkplekken, klanttevredenheid, sterke leveranciersrelaties en gemeenschapsbijdragen. Deze bedrijven, aangeduid als "small giants", beperken vaak hun groei om deze waarden te behouden, waarbij de rijkdom die ze creëren een bijproduct is van hun succes in andere gebieden.
The greatest confusion, however, comes into play around the notion of shareholder value. For public companies, it has a very specific meaning, since they are legally and morally obligated to strive to produce the best possible financial results for their shareholders. That’s the deal. If you take other people’s money, you’re supposed to give them what they want in exchange, and what buyers of publicly traded stocks want is a good return on their investments. The relationship seems so obvious, so logical that we generally assume all businesses must operate the same way. But that assumption ignores another equally obvious truth: What’s in the interest of shareholders depends on who the shareholders are. 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. They’d learned, moreover, that to excel in all those things, they had to keep ownership and control inside the company and, in many cases, place significant limits on how much and how fast they grew. The wealth they created, though substantial, was a byproduct of success in these other areas. I thought that companies like theirs deserved a name, but the name was, in fact, the last thing we came up with. As I was finishing up my research, Jay Goltz, one of the entrepreneurs I’d written about, suggested we call them “small giants.” That seemed just right.