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I didn’t watch much TV growing up. But when I stayed with my grandmother, we never missed The Price Is Right.   The game hasn’t evolved much since the 1980s: four randomly-selected contestants guess at the value of prizes displayed on the stage. The closest guess–without going over the actual price–is the winner. The winner gets to run up onto the stage to the sound of ringing bells and flashing lights and all the “DUN-dun-dun-DUNNNN!” music. When a contestant has no idea what to guess, they say “One dollar!” and hope that everyone else overbids, giving them a win by attrition. And sometimes it actually works–at least on TV.   The “one dollar” bid puts them onto the stage and gives them a chance to win the real prizes: hot tubs, sea-doos and cars from Barker’s Beauties. They probably don’t call them Beauties anymore.   Many entrepreneurs follow the same strategy: instead of determining the actual value, they bid low and hope everyone else goes out of business. I mean—it works on TV, right?   But in real life, it doesn’t work. Not in the service industry, and usually not in the product industry. Because someone will always bid seventy-five cents.   Bo Burlingame originally wrote “Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big” in 2006. He traveled around and met these “small giants” and wrote about their staff culture, client affinity and profit. One of the “small giants” is Zingerman’s Coffee, which I actually visited with Doug Chapman a couple of times, and who produced the original #CEO blend of coffee. Burlingame is right: they’re great. But they’re not great because of the culture or retention.   In 2016, Burlingame released a “Tenth Anniversary” edition of the book, and it contained an addendum: three of the companies he originally included had hit severe financial trouble, and one had gone bankrupt. The chapter–over an hour long on ...