With respect to traditional brick-and-mortar businesses the skills required to successfully build, grow, and manage a small business are different from those required do the same for a big corporation.
That is, successfully running a neighborhood cheese shop requires different skills - and attention to different metrics - than successfully running GE.
One is not 'better' or 'worse' than the other. They are simply different.
37signals is a small business. This is not a knock against them.
The knock against them is that they readily forget (ignore?) this when they point fingers at other, large corporations for operating differently from them.