Small differences.

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Editing this month's Small Business of the Year package reminded me of Tolstoy's opening line in Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." That, I thought, could also describe the difference between large and small businesses.

That doesn't mean small businesses are unhappy places any more than saying that size measures and ensures the opposite. But by its very bulk, a big business becomes a bureaucracy. Despite the difference in what they do, GE resembles IBM in more ways than not. On the other hand, a small company reflects and retains the character--the idiosyncrasies--of its owner and key players. Tom Hagen's repeated admonition in The Godfather that it's not personal, it's business only proves that the Corleone enterprise had outgrown a family firm. He'd have made a great corporate counsel.

"These are companies that, facing some of the toughest times imaginable, adapted to their individual markets, each in its own distinctive way," BNC Publisher Ben Kinney, one of the judges, says of this year's winner and runners-up. "They had something to lose--they had everything to lose. And they took it very personally." Taking business personally has been a theme of the stories we've published during the 15 years we've held this competition. And it's one of the things that have made telling them so enjoyable.

"I love doing profiles on small businesses for the same reason I like watching minor-league baseball," Contributing Editor David...