Growth

This was the post I was going to do after the first post on the Coronavirus but I got hacked.

A few weeks ago, I thought I would do some posts on the book Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson because they have some different ideas about work. They are kind of radical and their thinking goes against the mainstream thoughts.

This post is on their contention that growth isn’t always a desired goal.

A lot of what they say makes sense and I have thought the same way a few times. For me, sometimes a company can grow too fast before it is ready to take on a new way of managing. Managing a large company is very different from managing a small company: it requires a lot more policies and processes to instill discipline. The company can’t just allow all kinds of technologies to be enrolled in the network or just close the books whenever it feels like it. Standardization comes into play here and that takes discipline. Managers have to judge on when to fly by the seats and when to impose some rules.

But I can see one thing that would be attractive about growing big, aside from the ego of saying you head a large company and the power that stems from it: growth enables you to “promote” employees and thus retain them. If the company is not growing, then it has to get creative on making the employees feel they are progressing in their career or they will jump to another competitor. That could be one valid reason to grow.