From Smaller to Larger

There are twelve questions that must be answered if a company wants to get larger.

1. Does it deal with a market's Uncertainty or its Predictability?
2. Does it introduce Change to Tomorrow — i.e. something New and/or Different — or does it focus on doing better what it does Today?
3. What is the company's purpose? Is profit an end in itself or a means to an end?
4. How dependent is the company on its Founder? On management?
5. How does what the company can change compare with what it cannot change?
6. Are sales dependent on pricing or on volume?
7. How do costs that are fixed compare with those that are variable?
8. Does its strength offset its weakness, or is strength independent of weakness?
9. Does the company earn more profit from more sales, or less loss from less risk?
10. Is its skill set a “Distinctive Competence” that manages risk irrespective of what the company does or of how it does it?
11. Does the company's product increase its profits or reduce its customer's losses?
12. What is the role of the Founder, chief stockholder, and management in making decisions?

The book discusses how the answers to these questions decide what the company can do and what it cannot do; how the what is done and how it cannot be done; how an answer to one question affects the answer to another; how risk shapes those answers; and how what a company does is shaped by how that is done.

From Smaller to Larger sets forth how getting larger changes what a smaller company does, but not the skill set that determines how it does that. Getting larger becomes more than simply doing more of what was done in the past.

What the company does must change. How it does that must not change.