Fast growth is usually chaotic, and you can't take time to develop perspective on what you're doing. Competition is usually keen, and you're running as fast as you can, and that's the best you can do. When you catch your breath, you look back and take stock, and while you're weary, and there is still fault to find, you realize that you and your team have done something remarkable. You've innovated and dominated in ways you never expected.

Northeast Wisconsin, for its small size, is home to a slew of companies that, on a national scale, have showed the big guys a thing or two. Other companies from this region have been rock solid through decades and generations. Starting in the 1980s and 1990s, Green Bay industry went through an extraordinary period of creative growth, and the evolution of those organizations continues to be very strong.

It was a kind of a Golden Age.

In The Golden Age of Brown County Enterprise, author Phil Hauck highlights five of those organizations-companies that increased by well more than a

thousand employees, and created some aspect of dominance on a national level.