Feb
13
Growth is Just Another Word for Change
Wow, it’s been some time since I’ve posted here, and I do apologize to anyone who might have been reading last year. The back half of 2010 was one of the busiest periods of my career, both with work and my teaching schedule, so again, wow, six months is an embarrassingly long time between blog posts.
Well, 2011 doesn’t promise to be any less busy for me, and may in fact be more so. Regardless, I hope to keep the blog going and also to flesh out the rest of the site. In the past year, I’ve completed dozens of projects in branding, product development, and design, and I need to get it all posted, as each one is a story in itself … but enough excuses and apologies.
One of my ongoing personal and professional interests is growth. Most business ventures measure their success and health in terms of growth, specifically top-line (revenue) and bottom-line (profit) growth. From quarter to quarter, year over year. A business that continues to grow at a “healthy” rate, we generally assume, continues to win customers, develop new products, tap new markets, gain market share and ultimately reward shareholders.
Despite the sometimes unhealthy outcomes of this emphasis on growth (for instance, through accelerating depletion of the earth’s natural resources), the ability to continue to grow remains a hallmark of a successful business venture, of successful executive management and of sound strategy.
There is a strong correspondence in my mind between the organizational and the personal here in the sense that the most successful people continue to grow. Not always in quantifiable metrics, of course. They learn new skills, expand their networks, become more sophisticated and deeper, more rounded human beings.
Problems start, of course, when growth stalls. There was a great HBR article a few years back by Matthew S. Olson, Derek Van Bever and Seth Verry, called “When Growth Stalls.” The authors researched and categorized several of the most common causes for stalled growth in organizations. These include such phenomena as premium-position captivity, where we fall in love with high margins and allow competition to undercut our market share; innovation management breakdown; premature core abandonment; and talent bench shortfall, among others.
At the end of the day, however, Olson et al. conclude that the common root cause of stalled growth is a failure to adjust to changing circumstances in the external environment. The antidote is of course to develop self-critical disciplines that continually test assumptions and capacities against ongoing environmental scans.
I would add that we need a fair measure of courage. Growth is just another word for change. If we can’t or won’t change, we can’t grow. And change isn’t for the timorous, comfortable and complacent. It isn’t easy.
These realities apply both to organizations and to us as individual professionals/human beings. If we seek growth, we must be sensitive to changes in the external environment. And we must be prepared to embrace change, which means we must be prepared (indeed, we must find the courage) to make tough decisions and suffer a little pain here and there.
If we do not have the guts to change, we cannot expect to enjoy the benefits of long-term, meaningful growth. That’s really all there is to it.
