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Great (and extremely thorough) summary of Great By Choice - a book I think everyone building sustainable businesses should read. While a lot of the points Colli

Great (and extremely thorough) summary of Great By Choice - a book I think everyone building sustainable businesses should read. While a lot of the points Collins makes will be familiar to those familiar with the Lean Startup, GBC provides some awesome, real-world examples of how to translate those "lean principles" into action. However, I think you gave one of the most valuable and counter-intuitive points in the book too light a treatment: That successful 10X'ers not only consistently hit their goals, but actively tried not to exceed them. Living in the start up echo chamber you'd think that "speed" was everything; we do "agile" development, we take venture rounds to "supercharge growth". Hockey stick graphs are treated like the tech world's pornography, depicting circumstances just a tad too good to be real. The mantra is that if a little growth is good, a lot of growth is really good. GBC turns that on its head. Growth is good, but only a little bit. Only as much as you can handle. Explosive growth can quickly become uncontained growth can quickly become webvan. Facebook limited itself to college campuses, taking years to go public. Southwest started with 3 planes and didn't expand their routes until they had to. Zipcar stayed in Boston until it was absolutely sure it was ready to go to NYC. The 20 mile march is as much about having discipline in self-restraint as it is about pushing forward.

jasonshen 15y ago
That's a great point Ryan and I'm glad you brought it up. Everyone chases after "hockey stick growth" but it's important to note the cost of such growth: challenges with scale, whether that's with the codebase, server infrastructure, hiring, increased spending, etc. Example: Twitter. The fail whales almost brought them down. I think this is partially driven by investors funding things that have that hockey stick so hopefully some of them also read GBC and adjust their approach accordingly. I won't hold my breath on that one though =)

jasonshen 15y ago

That's a great point Ryan and I'm glad you brought it up. Everyone chases after "hockey stick growth" but it's important to note the cost of such growth: challenges with scale, whether that's with the codebase, server infrastructure, hiring, increased spending, etc. Example: Twitter. The fail whales almost brought them down. I think this is partially driven by investors funding things that have that hockey stick so hopefully some of them also read GBC and adjust their approach accordingly. I won't hold my breath on that one though =)