"Small companies dream big dreams and set the bar high."
The context of the above statement by Jack Welch was that a large company must act like a small, hungry company if it wants to thrive. It is interesting to note that once a company starts getting big, many of the elements that made them so, start to be lost, and the company plateaus or decreases.
In thinking on what a small company is, we need to understand that at every stage of growth, there's someone bigger than us or someone smaller than us. The exception could be when we launch a business at the beginning. I say "could" because some people large bigger than others.
So many times what someone else may consider a small company, when compared with others, may be quite large.
The point is being small is more of an attitude than it is the size factor. A large company that is run like a small company, is in reality a small company. It's simply a small company that generates a lot of money.
We must battle to keep the practices of being a small company at every stage of growth we're at in a business. We must fiercely fight to not get bogged down into complacency and a lack of urgency. A small company knows it could be gone relatively soon if it decides to settle down.
What a lot of large companies fail to understand is they could be already gone, it only takes them longer to realize it because they have more money to burn through before they realize they're a corpse. That's the danger in running a company like it's huge and impregnatable.
Regardless of the size of our companies, we need to continue to run them lean and hungry. Anybody doing that will be able to compete with anyone in the marketplace.
Jack Welch saw that General Electric (GE), in spite of its growing size, had to continue to be run this way. That's why exploded the company's size and revenue under his leadership.
Other Jack Welch Resources:
Jack Welch's advice to MIT Sloan students
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