In our childhoods, we heard about David slaying Goliath and about the bad giant who fee-fi-foe-fummed about the blood of an Englishman. Had we grown up in New Delhi or Oslo, one hundred years ago or even a thousand, we would have heard similar giant stories; they are universal.
The giants in these myths are the same: They are scary and—fortunately for the hero—stupid. Giants also are unholy; they war with the gods. In different story versions, Goliath was a pagan, a representative of Satan, or both.
From childhood, we equate big with evil.
We do it instantly with the wolf. He is not just big but bad: the big bad wolf. Oafs are not small, either; they are big oafs. Slovenly people are never small but always fat and big: they are big fat slobs.
Godzilla, the T. rex, the great white whale of Moby Dick, the great white shark of Jaws: the huge offends and terrifies us.
Hearing these stories, we identify with the small characters: Little Bo Peep, Little Jack Horner, Little Boy Blue, or Little Miss Muffet, one of the girls from Little Women or the boy in The Little Prince. Later, we root for Little Orphan Annie and the Little Mermaid, and later still for Little Miss Sunshine. We adopt as our symbol of American persistence a small locomotive: The Little Engine That Could.
In George Orwell’s harrowing view in 1984, Big Brother controls us. Politicians promise us that they “look out for the little guy,” arouse us by deploring Big Government, and often help wage the battle against Big Oil.
Big businesses suffer bad press. They are staffed with The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, the cube dwellers, the clueless bosses in Dilbert. We view Big Business as business but equate small business with art; we call it entrepreneurship. The suffix of that word, -ship, connotes goodness and skill, as we see in the words “sportsmanship,” “craftsmanship,” “leadership,” and “scholarship.”
The word “entrepreneur” also sounds artistic, and it should. The word comes from the French, who first used the word to denote a leader in the arts: specifically, the director of a musical institution.
The leader of a business engages in the act of being busy—literally, busy ness—and makes things. An entrepreneur, by contrast, engages in artistry; she makes music or something closely akin to it.
It goes further. We call large companies businesses but refer to small ones as enterprises, and to be enterprising, as the Random House Dictionary reminds us, is to be “characterized by a bold daring energetic spirit.” Businesses are characterized by profit and loss, but enterprises are bold and daring; they are the starship Enterprises of our day, boldly going “where no man has gone before.”
We revere the Thomas Edisons who started these great enterprises, even though many, including Edison, proved totally incapable of running them. We regularly nod at the old saw “Behind every great fortune is a great crime.” That’s what our ancestors said of the men who founded America’s first huge industries, oil and the railroads; they dubbed them Robber Barons. In that tradition, a generation of American journalists called the muckrakers became famous by exposing the alleged misdeeds of Standard Oil and other large businesses.
In 1973, a British economist named E. F. Schumacher printed a series of essays in a book whose title became part of our American business vernacular: Small Is Beautiful. The title derives from Schumacher’s quotation, straight from the pages of David and Goliath: “Man is small. Therefore, small is beautiful.”
In 1995, Alan Webber and Bill Taylor followed Schumacher’s lead and launched the magazine Fast Company, focusing on the smaller technology companies they saw transforming our culture. Their choice of title reflects a popular view: Small companies are fast, not the plodding Goliaths that dominate the pages of Forbes and Fortune.
Fortune noticed Fast Company’s success and began morphing into a magazine that now insists on staying current on Twitter, Facebook, and Skype, and that each year devotes relatively more columns to the Davids than the Goliaths on which it once focused totally. On its website, Fortune constantly updates a section devoted to computing’s David, Apple.
The David language also reflects a popular American view of Big Business: Giants are evil. Apple’s employees and fans call their enemy, Microsoft, the Evil Empire, a title that tech hackers once attached to IBM. Five minutes away in Mountain View, Sergey Brin and Larry Page rally their masses at Google behind a telling battle cry: Don’t be evil.
Watch where we congregate in cities on weekends: Greenwich Village in New York, Ybor City in Tampa, Twenty-Third Street in Portland, Gaslamp Quarter in San Diego, and Capitol Hill in Seattle. They are skyscraper-free. The Yuma Building looms as a towering monument in Gaslamp at just three stories. Many of the restaurants on Twenty-Third Street are in old homes. Others flee even those small places to small towns like Chatham, Cannon Beach, and Carmel, where a three-story building would look alien.
Given our choice, we flee big and head to small. We’ve been doing it almost from the moment our cities’ buildings started scraping their skies. Headlines bemoan the flight from our inner cities, but do the editors realize what we are doing? We are acting out Little vs. Big.
You can see it in our choice of these urban areas and weekend favorites and in our choice of words. How do we describe an inviting, small restaurant? We call it “intimate,” which suggests that small is personal and big is not; and we call it “cozy,” a reminder that small makes us comfortable and big makes us uneasy.
It’s this realization that drove the creation of Disneyland and Disney World. A visitor there easily misses the trick its designers have played. The buildings aren’t normal. They are two-thirds scale by design; the wizards of Disney knew about Little vs. Big, as you might expect of a company that is built around children and the stories from our childhood, like Swiss Family Robinson and Sleeping Beauty. The parks are big yet feel little and accessible, and we feel bigger when we walk their paths.
Look at the ascendancy of the dollar stores. Their prices are appealing, but their scale is made to be, too: a Family Dollar and Dollar General Store takes up just 6,500 square feet, while a Dollar Tree isn’t much bigger than many homes, at just 3,900 square feet. Abercrombie & Fitch stores work Little vs. Big, too, squeezing into intimate spaces and highlighting them with dark, intimate lighting, leather couches, rugs, and foliage, a feeling accentuated by the low ceilings. Welcome to our little home.
Which bring us to the trials of Ford and General Motors. Do they struggle not just because health-care costs add almost $2,000 to the cost of each American car, or because other American labor costs are high, or because GM created too many brands that no one could tell apart? Or do they struggle because they succeeded?
Did Ford and GM succeed and from that grow too big for us? They became giants, and we do not believe in “Too big to fail.” We believe that becoming big dooms one to failure.
So our government had to rescue Ford and GM because few of us would. We don’t trust giants; we never have.
On the night of April 8, 2009, a short, stout, and unemployed lady appears on the stage of Britain’s Got Talent, the U.K.’s version of our American Idol. She tells the judges she is forty-seven and has never been kissed; we believe her, as the wicked big judge Simon Cowell rolls his eyes. Just as she is about to sing, the camera focuses on the handsome judge with the kinder face. Even that nice fellow is chuckling.
A pause.
Susan Boyle sings the first line, and when she hits the fifth note, the camera pans across the three judges’ faces; their eyes are open wide. The crowd is clapping, soon to be shouting. At twenty seconds, they are standing and shouting. The pretty judge Amanda raises her hands to her face, and we sense her tears coming. And ours, too.
It is the great American story enacted on a British stage, and it reaches America in minutes. Watching on YouTube, covered with goose bumps, we watch that mean Simon Cowell beam, and others watch by the multimillions. Over the next thirty days, a single clip of Boyle’s performance attracts 78 million hits on YouTube—exactly one hit every second.
Americans are famous for our love of underdogs like Susan Boyle. Underdogs demonstrate a truth we hold self-evident: that because we all are created equal, we all are capable of extraordinary things—becoming president, starting a billion-dollar company, writing the Great American Novel from a house in foreclosure. Underdogs confirm our very American faith in the Little Man, the Little Prince, the Little Engine That Could.
So when Susan Boyle serenaded the world, the people in our country cheered the loudest. We cried, too, not least of all because she and the producers chose the perfect American underdog song for her, as clever a piece of scripting as you will ever see: They had her sing “I Dreamed a Dream.”
Apple understands Susan Boyle’s appeal to us. In Apple’s Mac vs. PC commercials, the Mac character is played by actor Justin Long. A stray brown hair over 5 feet 8 inches and a Red Bull over 145 pounds, Long looks like a chill kid who in high school might have been named “Most Likely Not to Appear in Class,” which he was.
The PC character is played by actor John Hodgman. Seven years older and many pounds heavier than Long, Hodgman looks like a guy who played viola in his high school orchestra, which he did.
Apple’s ads work Little vs. Big, the likable little underdog, as Apple always has. Justin Longish and defying upperdog convention, skinny Steve Jobs made all his major appearances wearing nondesigner jeans and white New Balance running shoes. Microsoft’s John Hodgmanish CEO Steve Ballmer makes his major appearances in button-down shirts, slacks, and polished leather shoes. The mostly young tech-business press covers Ballmer, whom Business Week once described as being “built like a linebacker,” respectfully; they treated skinny Steve Jobs with wonder. Jobs knew they love an underdog, and like Ben & Jerry and the folks at Mini Cooper, he and his company constantly play that role and earn our special affection.
You walk into Irvine Spectrum mall in Irvine, California, and quickly notice an odd store. What gets your attention is the name: There isn’t one. Instead, the store sports three logos on the front: 6.0, Hurley, and Converse.
You walk into No Name, notice the snowboarding and skateboarding merchandise, and eventually ask, “Who is behind this?”
The answer is Nike. Nike makes 6.0 products and acquired Hurley in 2002 and Converse a year later. Then why isn’t the Nike name on the store?
The answer is Goliath. Nike knows that younger customers, particularly skateboarders and snowboarders, see themselves as renegades and underdogs and are at that age where big looks particularly odious. To them, as Nike’s Jeanne Jackson reaffirms, “It’s not cool to have a big hairy name over the door.”
David and Goliath thinking also prompted the creation in late 2008 of a new bus service aimed at the urban young and newly shrewd: BoltBus. By offering leather seats, ample leg room, and the perk of the decade, free WiFi, Bolt boldly distances itself from that old bus line that even sounds like our granddad, Greyhound. There’s just one catch: With the deft help of the Sausalito, California, ad agency Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners, it was Greyhound that created, and now owns, BoltBus.
It’s a misty March afternoon in Seattle, and you’ve made your way to the center of the city’s counterculture, the Capitol Hill neighborhood.
The Hill offers a remarkable mix. It’s the neighborhood that gave the world grunge and Seattle’s first millionaires the perfect site for their homes. You come onto the 600 block of Fourteenth Avenue and see one right after another the three-story brick and Tudor mansions of Seattle’s Millionaires’ Row.
Once off Fourteenth, everywhere else you look is a coffeehouse: Caffe Ladro, Caffé Vita, Café Dharwin, Fuel Coffee, Insomniax, Stumptown, People’s Republic of Koffee, B&O Espresso (where Pearl Jam came up with its name), Online Coffee. You notice one Victrola Coffee and Art, then a second, and on Broadway, a Starbucks, but of course, this is Starbucks’ hometown.
On Fifteenth Avenue you notice a particularly intriguing looking spot: 15th Ave Coffee and Tea. Inside, your eyes go immediately to its massive stainless steel espresso machine. You strain to read the barely legible logo on its burnished surface. It reads La Marzocco. You imagine that 15th Ave’s owner spotted this machine in a Rome coffeehouse and bought it from the Italian owner who was about to retire.
You are close. The owners purchased the machine new from Florence, Italy, where La Marzocco has made these machines since 1929, famous for brewing every cup within a half-degree Celsius of every other.
The owners seem to have worked the nearby antique stores: a set of 1930s-era wooden theater seats flank the aged blonde oak chairs around the tables. It’s the hip classic coffeehouse you might find if the hipster owners had huge trust funds.
You’re impressed. You decide this place might give Starbucks a run.
But this store isn’t a threat to Starbucks, even at a time when Starbucks has closed 961 stores in one year and laid off 6,700 employees over two years; it’s Starbucks’ counterattack. Howard Schultz and his team decided it needed to innovate, and this test shop was one response. There’s a subtle clue of this on the 15th Ave sign. It reads “Inspired by Starbucks.”
There’s no question what you are seeing: a Little strategy. 15th Ave makes that explicit in its promotions, saying it promotes small local music groups to perform in the evenings and uses products from selected small farmers. (The Caribou Coffee chain executes its Little strategy with similar words, promising that its teas and oatmeals are “handcrafted,” for example.)
This strategy is Starbucks’ approach to what many call “The Big Coffee problem” and for which the owner of the rival Victrola Coffee chose the perfect words to conclude this section: “The Goliath is coming at me under a new name.”