
Why Small Companies Will Win in This Economy - peter123
http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/bregman/2009/03/why-small-companies-will-win-i.html
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ggchappell
There are some worthwhile ideas in this article, but I have a slightly
different take on them.

The sentence near the end, "Trust is the new competitive advantage." is the
main point. And he says small companies tend to have the advantage as far as
trust goes. But, while that _is_ generally true, it might be looked at as a
challenge for large companies.

As I see it, large companies have two advantages: (1) they can take advantage
of economies of scale, and (2) when they figure out how to do something
_right_ , they can apply their knowledge very widely.

For an example of #2, consider Joel Spolsky's statement about Big Macs: "The
secret of Big Macs is that they're not very good, but every one is not very
good in exactly the same way." If someone is in an unfamiliar area, other
restaurants may offer the possibility of better food, but McDonald's has them
beat on _trust_ : when you go to McDonald's, you know exactly what you are
going to get.

So, rather than say that trust being an advantage, means that small companies
are going to win, we might say that, in order to be competitive in this
economy, large companies need to figure out trust.

And, for better or worse, the ones that do figure it out, might very well beat
the small companies hands down.

