being small...

There is something almost sad about watching a small company try to behave like a big one.

It begins innocently enough.

The company wants to become more professional, so it introduces more processes, more committees, more reporting, more layers of approval and a growing collection of meetings in which people discuss what will eventually be discussed in another meeting.

It starts copying the language, structures and management rituals of much larger organizations.

And somewhere along the way, it voluntarily gives up the very advantages that made it interesting in the first place.

A small company does not have the scale, capital, installed base or market power of a large one. But it has something the large company would often pay a considerable amount of money to recover.

It can move quickly.

It can concentrate resources.

It can change direction without having to protect decades of previous investment.

It can make decisions close to the customer, test ideas before they become strategic programmes and act while larger competitors are still aligning stakeholders.

Those are not temporary imperfections to be corrected on the way to becoming big.

They are strategic advantages.

The problem is that many smaller companies do not fully trust them. They associate complexity with maturity and bureaucracy with professionalism, so they begin replicating the constraints of larger businesses without acquiring any of their advantages.

It reminds me of people who copy the portfolio of a famous investor without understanding that they are not playing the same game.

The investor may have a different time horizon, access to liquidity, tax situation, risk tolerance and ability to survive losses. The portfolio may look the same, but the game is completely different.

Strategy works in much the same way.

A small company should certainly learn from larger ones. But it should be very careful about copying them.

Because the objective is not to look like the companies you compete with.

It is to understand what you can do that they cannot.

And then build the company around that.