Kevin D. Hendricks

Businesses Don’t Have to Continually Grow

Ever since starting my own business I’ve found the unending thirst for growth in the business world to be a bit bizarre. Maybe even perverse. How can a company continually grow? At some point you run out of people willing to buy widgets. What’s wrong with simply doing well?

Every now and then I come across somebody smart who backs up my anti-growth leanings. This time it’s Ricardo Semler, the CEO of the Brazilian company Semco. He shared these thoughts at MIT’s Sloan Business School:

The assumption that growth is good for companies is a very difficult one to sustain. There is no evidence whatsoever that companies that grow a lot do better than companies that don’t grow a lot.

(link via 37Signals)