Bo Burlingham : League of Extraordinary Minds Expert Panelist

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Bo Burlingham Bo Burlingham is the author of Small Giants: Companies That Choose To Be Great Instead of Big (Portfolio, 2006) and an Editor-at-large of Inc. magazine.

My story in brief: I joined Inc. in January 1983 as a senior editor and became executive editor six months later, a position I held for the next seven years or so. In 1990, I resigned and became editor-at-large for a number of reasons, including my desire to go back to writing. I subsequently wrote two books with Jack Stack, the co-founder and CEO of Springfield Remanufacturing Corp. and the pioneer of open-book management. One of the books, The Great Game of Business (Doubleday/Currency, 1992), has sold more than 300,000 copies. (It explains what open-book management is and how it works in practice at the company that does it best.) The other, A Stake in the Outcome (Doubleday/Currency, 2002), has also done pretty well and gotten great reviews. (It’s a book you should read if you want to know what it really takes to run an employee-owned company.)

Before joining Inc., I freelanced for various publications, including Esquire, Harper’s, Boston Magazine, and Mother Jones. I was also managing editor of Ramparts magazine for a while, if anyone can remember back that far. In 1982, I joined Fidelity Investments, where I wrote for Peter Lynch, Ned Johnson, and other honchos until coming to Inc. From 1992 to 1997, I served on the board of The Body Shop Inc., the U.S. subsidiary of the international cosmetics company. I was also a founder, with Tom Peters, of PAC World, a weird international networking group that gave me a chance to meet a lot of zany and brilliant people from around the globe.

What else? I’ve been married 35 years to my wonderful wife, Lisa. We have two children and one fabulous grandson, with a granddaughter on the way. We live…well, that’s a long story. Let’s just say I’m always at large.