In contrast, there is the example of Duncan Syme and Vermont Castings. Syme had a vision: to make the best wood stoves in the world. He believed in this so much that he would personally stand on the production line to ensure that each stove met his exacting standards. During the 1970s, Vermont Castings became the fastest growing company in the wood stove industry, reaching sales of $29 million and margins as high as 60%.

Then, in the early 1980s, Syme stepped away from daily operations and turned the company over to professional managers (day-to-day management, Syme admitted, was not his strength).

But there was a critical problem: Syme’s vision went into retirement with Syme. In his absence, the company lowered quality standards, diluted its traditional focus on wood stoves, reduced customer service, and pulled the company away from its original vision. Sales and profit growth flattened, the company lost its ability to bring out innovative products, and many felt the company had lost its greatness.

Syme returned to Vermont Castings in 1986 and got it back on track, reinstalling his vision and regaining the company’s position as the premier woodstove maker.

This time, however, he took an entirely different approach, as he explained in Inc. magazine. Instead of relying solely on himself to be the guardian of the “Vermont Castings Way,” he began a process of institutionalizing his vision. He wrote a “Statement of Vermont Castings Vision and Creed” and began the long process of ensuring that it was expressed in all operational decisions.

Not everything needs to scale to succeed—as Leah Andrews, founder of Queen of Snow Globes, discovered almost by accident. She runs an extremely unscalable business: creating intricate and unique snow globes, one at a time, for her customers. From the start, she was inundated with requests for these custom pieces of art, from big names like Quentin Tarantino and Channing Tatum and even from Netflix’s corporate offices. Instead of scaling production, she focused on raising her prices higher and higher until the demand leveled off to where she could handle orders. She focused on creating an amazing product that was better than the competition —mass-produced snow globes—and was able to charge a huge premium for her work. Because she focused on making the best product, not the most scalable product, she grew her profits quickly without scaling production, which would have also scaled complexity and expenses.

But it is an archaeological site called Sunghir, discovered in the 1950s on the muddy banks of Klyazma River on the eastern fringes of the Russian city of Vladimir, that hints at how these populations busied themselves while waiting for the worst of winter to pass. Included among the stone tools and other more conventional bits and pieces, archaeologists there discovered several graves. None were more remarkable than the elaborate shared grave of two young boys who, sometime between 30,000 and 34,000 years ago, were buried together alongside a straightened mammoth-tusk lance in clothing decorated with nearly 10,000 laboriously carved mammoth-tusk beads, as well as pieces including a belt decorated with teeth plucked from the skulls of over a hundred foxes.

With archaeologists estimating it took up to 10,000 hours of work to carve these beads alone—roughly equivalent to five years’ full-time effort for one individual working forty hours a week—some have suggested that these boys must have enjoyed something resembling noble status, and as a result that these graves indicate formal inequality among these foragers. It is at best tenuous evidence of institutional hierarchy; after all, some egalitarian foraging societies like the Ju/’hoansi made similarly elaborate items. But the amount of time and skill involved in manufacturing the mammoth beads and other items suggests that, like the indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest, the annual work cycle for them was seasonal and that in the winter months people often focused their energies on more artistic, indoor pursuits.

And Frontiere’s Rams would get to the Super Bowl for a second and third time, including the Ram’s first-ever Super Bowl Championship in 2000. Gliding along on a convertible in the celebratory parade after winning the Super Bowl, she heard fans all up and down the route cheering, “We love you, Georgia.” “I’ve never felt so much love,” said Frontiere, shining at age 72, “and I’ve never loved so much.

There is no evidence that there was anyone (other than perhaps Carroll Rosenbloom) who imagined that Frontiere— a former Las Vegas chorus girl and lounge singer who’d been married five times by her early 30s— would one day become known as Madame Ram, appear in an American Express commercial as a savvy business icon, oversee the “Greatest Show on Turf,” and win a Super Bowl ring. Neither Graham nor Frontiere fully clicked into frame as business leaders until after age 50, and they flourished in line with their encodings well into their 60s and 70s.