Growing, growing... gone

Last week, Jeffrey Phillips wrote about identifying the purpose of your business. This topic resonates with me, because I've seen firsthand what can happen when companies get stuck on growth as the Prime Directive.

While it's true that we all want our businesses to maintain a healthy rate of growth, Jeffrey is completely correct in his assessment that money is an outcome rather than a purpose. The same is true of growth; growth is the result that you get when you do everything else right. But if you instead frame growth as that right thing to do, it can skew your perspective and force your business into making decisions that are ethically and morally questionable. Enron is just the ugliest and most public example, but lots of businesses create small-scale disasters every day because they're more concerned with growing the bottom line than with anything else.

If you put growth before all else, then everything else suffers. No matter that your company's mission statement is filled with the most flowery, buzzword-laden language ever; if your key strategic driver is growth, then the customers don't come first, period. If your key strategic driver is growth, then the employees don't come in first (or second or third, most likely), period. If your key strategic driver is growth, then innovation probably isn't even in the Top Five.

I'm not suggesting that it's wrong to want to grow your business; it's perfectly fine to list growth among your company's goals for the year. However, you have to be very specific in terms of how you frame the goal.

I'm a big believer that we can all have what we want, by stating specifically what that desire is (and then working like a dog to get it). But if you're not careful about how you state what it is you want, you can set yourself up. The old adage, "Be careful what you wish for; you might just get it" rings true to me. It's not so much that you might find that you didn't want "it" so much after all; it's more what you might get along with "it" that you didn't plan on.

Let me put it this way: I've heard countless jokes about genies granting wishes that go horribly awry because the Wisher wasn't quite specific enough (my personal favorite ends with the punchline, "and so his legs fell off"). And while I don't think that the gods of business are just waiting for you to state a goal that's just vague enough that they can wreak havoc on your company, I do believe that it's critical that you frame your goals specifically enough that you have a clear path to the goal.

Here are just a few of the negative outcomes when growth is the Prime Directive:

• Innovation gets short shrift, because thinking is costly under the Time = Money model.
• Employees who work in cost center departments (rather than profit centers) start to get the feeling that they're expendable. This usually happens because that's how they're treated.
• The corporate culture shifts from "it's about the customers, stupid!" to "it's about the profit, stupid!"
• You treat your customers differently, because you're looking at ways to make money from them, rather than ways to serve them.

If you want to grow your business, you're going to do so by achieving other goals: goals related to your customers, your employees, or the meat of what your business offers. By developing your goals according to relationships and business effectiveness, you're going to focus your energy (and that of your employees) on how you can be better, rather than the somewhat vague intention to grow.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself:

1. Does our mission statement really reflect the company we are and want to be?
2. Are we about making money, or about doing something great?
3. What are the messages we send to our employees about what's important to the business?
4. Do our clients think that we're partners instrumental in their success, or are we just another vendor?

Tomorrow, I'm going to start a series of posts about management skills for the new manager.