Recommended Reading: How Fast Should Your Company Really Grow?
Growth is usually treated as an unquestioned goal. More customers, more revenue, more locations, more employees. But there is another question leaders should be asking:
How fast should your company actually grow?
That question is explored in the Harvard Business Review article, “How Fast Should Your Company Really Grow?”, and it is a worthwhile read for leaders responsible for building organizations that need to perform today while preparing for tomorrow.
Growth Requires More Than Opportunity
One of the important ideas explored in the article is that the right pace of growth is not determined solely by the opportunities available in the market.
Leaders also need to consider whether the organization has the people, capabilities, culture, processes, and resources necessary to support that growth.
Growth that exceeds an organization’s ability to execute can create challenges rather than value. The article provides a useful framework for thinking about how leaders can determine an appropriate growth rate based on both external opportunity and internal readiness.
A Natural Connection to Growth and Legacy
This perspective connects closely with a question we have been exploring at Anavo: Are you building a company for growth or a company for legacy?
Our view is that the strongest companies do both.
Sustainable growth requires leaders to think beyond the next revenue target. They need to consider what happens to the culture as the organization expands, whether employees are prepared for new responsibilities, whether customers continue receiving the experience they expect, and whether the systems supporting the business can keep pace.
Those same decisions ultimately influence the legacy of the organization.
Growth at the Right Pace
There is an important distinction between pursuing growth and building an organization capable of sustaining it.
Sometimes the greatest opportunity is to accelerate. At other times, leadership may need to strengthen capabilities, develop people, improve processes, or reinforce the culture before pursuing the next stage of expansion.
The HBR article provides a useful perspective for leaders making those decisions and reinforces an important principle:
The goal should not simply be to grow fast. It should be to build an organization capable of turning growth into lasting value.
We recommend reading the full article and considering what the ideas mean for your own organization.
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