My brief experiment in a university education included just two economics classes—Intro to Micro and Intro to Macro—and while I didn’t retain much from either, I still vividly recall the first lesson that growth was a mandatory requirement of the economy.

If the professor explained why growth had to be a constant, I didn’t retain it. Nor did I challenge it at the time, but I spent decades thinking this cannot be true.

It cannot be true, I thought, that growth is mandatory for an economy or a business, just as it cannot be true for a person, plant or an animal. All systems are resource constrained, and all of them seem to have their natural limits.

The growth mandate implied that there is no such thing as “enough”—that there is never enough. I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. I was 18 years old.

Today I understand that growth is mandatory for everyone and almost everything, that the drive for growth is perhaps the most fundamental force in the universe, and that none of us would be here if this were not true.

It took me 40 years to get here, with no progress at all in the first 30, during which striving for growth beyond a certain point just seemed unnecessary—greedy, even.

What Is Growth and How Does It Happen?

Growth is self-exploration and self-advancement, achieved through the twin actions of conjecture and criticism.

Systems of all kinds (businesses and people to name just two) use these twin tools of conjecture and criticism as they seek to lower their entropy (move from randomness to order). More simply stated, we—people, animals, businesses and economies—all strive to become better. It is in our nature.

We have in us an innate drive to explore the possibilities of what we might be (conjectures) and to double down on the winners—the possibilities that prove, through trial and error (criticism), to be the most profitable. Living organisms do this at every level, from the genes of the individual all the way up to species within the ecosystem.

This force to grow may be more fundamental than physics itself.

The same evolutionary force and tools are at work in the non-physical. Human knowledge expands through the same drive to reduce entropy, using the same tools of conjecture and criticism.

It’s the same for your character as a person.

It’s the same for the abstraction that is your business.

And it’s the same still for the larger abstraction that is the economy—an ecosystem of businesses.

Are There Enough Resources?

I had lots of arguments for why growth could not be a constant, and over 40 years they’ve all been disproved to me. I’ll speak to the big one here because I was hung up on it for years: infinite growth can not be fueled by finite resources.

Wrong.

The combined economic value creation of the readers of this post is in the many billions of dollars, and little of that value can be attributed to raw materials—probably far less than 0.01%. The economy grows and grows as people and businesses grow, adding more knowledge and order to a few raw resources.

Joe Pine, author of The Experience Economy, illustrates this beautifully in his book and in this brief video on The Progression of Economic Value in which he explains how a birthday cake went from 20 cents of raw materials to a $2 packaged cake mix, to a $20 cake, to a $200 birthday party. Some of you have spent $2,000 on your child’s birthday experience. That’s three or four orders of magnitude in value creation with only a marginal increase in raw materials.

There are other reasons we are not hard-resource constrained—like substitutability, invention, simple recycling and more advanced ideas like mining off-planet resources—but this post is meant to be about your business, so I’ll keep moving.

Grow or Die

Just because something can grow for its lifetime, does that mean that it should?

Yes. Your business must grow, or it will die. This isn’t a philosophical point and it’s not rooted in a belief.

If growth is a fundamental driving force of the universe then we can look at this growth as a good thing for everyone. (If we were anti-humanity, anti-life, anti-universe, we could choose to look at this as a bad thing I suppose, but that seems like a silly choice.)

Growth is the journey we are all on. Together.

Opting out of the growth mandate slows the whole project down, fights the universe’s evolutionary drive and turns you into fertilizer for others that have answered the call to growth.

In a world where every life and business is constantly striving, the ones that do not evolve get outcompeted and go extinct.

Of course you need to ensure that you and your business are growing in the right way. It’s easy to confuse growth metrics with the thing they’re supposed to be measuring.

The Map Isn’t The Territory

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is probably a good measure of the growth of an economy (an aggregation of businesses) and earnings is a decent measure for the growth of a business. There are individual exceptions within the whole, however. Some of those businesses achieving higher earnings in the short term are doing so at the cost of their long-term growth and viability. That’s a logical danger when you pursue the economic measures of growth—revenue and profit—too directly instead of real growth itself.

The growth of a person’s intellect is in their explanatory knowledge. In one’s character, it’s their morality. You could translate both of those to a business, with explanatory knowledge equating to products validated in the marketplace, and morality to the degree to which honesty, cooperation, respect and other widely acknowledged virtues are baked into the culture. 

Whether it’s the growth of businesses or of people, it’s common to mistake the map for the territory it represents. 

Economist John Kay (who I cite on this topic every time I come back to it) points out in his excellent book Obliquity: Why Our Goals are Best Achieved Indirectly that when we pursue things like wealth, fame and happiness directly, they tend to elude us. To get any of these things, says Kay, we should instead pursue our purpose, which he claims is universal.

What Is Our Purpose?

Bruce Springsteen has arrived at the same truth. In the Netflix documentary The Defiant Ones (about record producer Jimmy Iovine), Springsteen seems to follow Kay, tapping into the driving force of the universe when telling his own story.

“I didn’t want to be rich. I didn’t want to be famous. I didn’t even want to be happy. I wanted to be great.”

Carve that in stone.

In Kay’s words, a person has the same purpose as a tiger, a business, a tree, or The Boss: to be great.

Wealth, fame and happiness can be good measures of your growth, but they’re not growth itself. Greatness is the goal, or at least the direction. Greatness is something you pursue—something we are all driven to pursue—and there is no there there. 

The moment you say, “Okay I’m/we’re great. This is enough. Time to stop.” is the moment that greatness eludes you, the world begins to pass you by and you begin to die the high entropy heat death of irrelevance.

There is no end. The idea of “enough” is a misunderstanding of purpose—the drive to become great—and of the nature of the universe itself.

If you have “enough” money, you shouldn’t stop growing your business, you should invest that extra money in something that helps you with the growth of your character or your firm’s character (culture). Give to your favourite causes, overpay your people, start a charity, pay more than the number on your tax return—whatever floats your boat. 

Your business wants to strive, to grow, to be even greater than it is.

Your best people want to work in an organization that is striving. If you opt out of growth you will become a magnate for others who have also opted out and they will demoralize, depress and ultimately bankrupt you.

Growth Isn’t Without Problems

There are environmental and social costs to growth that we must manage, and, if the civility of our discourse is any measure, we don’t seem to be managing them well these days. We need some environmental regulations and some income redistribution without undermining the fundamental drive to grow, and we will never agree on what level of either is appropriate. But we have to try.

As difficult as the world may seem right now, all our problems are solvable. The only mistakes would be to quit working together to find solutions, and to think that growth itself is the problem.

Growth isn’t the problem, it is the driving force of the universe. Instead of fighting it, we should harness it and ride the ride as long as we are able.

The prize for solving any problem is a ticket to the next problem. Business is little more than a series of problems that you solve through conjecture (ideas) and criticism (testing in the marketplace). Life is the same. Your genes got the memo, too. 

Just as there is no finish line when pursuing greatness, there is no end to problem solving. You solve one, then you’re confronted with a problem that you previously did not know existed. This is the Theory of Constraints elucidated in Eliyahu Goldratt’s brilliant business novel The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement.

When I finally understood that a meaningful life and business are both a series of never-ending problems to solve, I quit being troubled by my problems. I then became aware of people everywhere surprised by and complaining about their problems!

“What!? I just fixed that other thing and now this!?!”

Yes! Isn’t it great? 

You will spend the rest of your career solving a series of problems, most of which you cannot see right now because they are brought into existence by your solving of the problem in front of you.

Problems are simply the frontier of your growth.

You can fret about this endless problem solving or, like Sisyphus, you can come to accept that you will always be rolling that boulder up the hill, so you might as well embrace it.

Your problems will end when you do. A business or a life with no problems is a business or life that has ceased to exist. May you have many days of problems ahead of you.

Can Your Business Grow If You Do Not?

Holy shit that’s a long setup to the questions I wanted to pose to you. (Sorry!)

For the few people still reading, if you’re finding business growth elusive, consider the following:

  1. Are you truly embracing growth or are you secretly fighting it, worried that it’s wrong, that growth is bad?
  2. Are you so busy chasing the metrics of growth (revenue, head count, profit) that you have quit growing—stopped striving to be a great business that is constantly innovating through the relentless marketplace testing of new ideas?
  3. Can a business grow when its people are not growing?
  4. What would it mean to help your people, or yourself, to grow so that your business can grow?

I come back to this topic of growth frequently as I learn more about it. My most recent piece that touched on chasing the wrong metrics of growth was Attending The Way. It’s one of my favourite pieces of authorship in over twenty years of writing. If you made it this far you’ll like that one. 

-Blair