Growth has a natural rate that is optimum for the organism
Summary
- Growth has a natural rate that is optimum for the organism
Details
- If we grow too fast we lack the support structures and infrastructure to hold everything up
- "It does not pay to try to get the business all at once. In the first place, you can’t get it, so a good deal of your money is thrown away. In the second place, if you did get it, the factory could not handle it. And in the third place, if you did get it, you could not hold it. A company that gets business too quickly acts just about as a boy does who gets money too quickly." - Harvey Firestone
References
Quotes
“For every type of animal there is a most convenient size, and a change in size inevitably carries with it a change of form,” Haldane wrote.
A most convenient size.
A proper state where things work well but break when you try to scale them to a different size or speed.
It applies to so many things in life.
Schultz wrote in his 2011 book Onward: “Growth, we now know all too well, is not a strategy. It is a tactic. And when undisciplined growth became a strategy, we lost our way.”
There was a most convenient size for Starbucks—there is for all businesses. Push past it and you realize that revenue might scale but disappointed customers scale faster, in the same way Robert Wadlow became a giant but struggled to walk.
Tire tycoon Harvey Firestone understood this well, and wrote in 1926:
It does not pay to try to get the business all at once. In the first place, you can’t get it, so a good deal of your money is thrown away. In the second place, if you did get it, the factory could not handle it. And in the third place, if you did get it, you could not hold it. A company that gets business too quickly acts just about as a boy does who gets money too quickly.