““If You’re Not Growing You’re Dying” is probably one of the most misunderstood business rules in a long, long list of misunderstood business rules. Too many mismanagers mistake that phrase to mean the growth is the agent that keeps the business alive. That is not what the phrase means, or should mean.
It’s more important to stay alive than to grow, ask any number of short people or many exceptionally long people. Concentrating on growth allows lazy mismanagers to pretend to have their eye on the target while looking at easy stuff that could be handled by an intern: a stupid, unmotivated intern. Growth mismanagers worry about advertising/marketing, paying the sales force more to develop more sales, reducing costs (like R&D, manufacturing, or employee development), and juggling the books to provide the appearance of growth. None of those things are likely to create long term growth and most of them waste resources that will likely kill the business.
If that kind of mismanager were inclined to take advice from an honest consultant (both, a rare breed), that consultant would tell the growth mismanager “Don’t worry about growing, dumbass. You are dying. Try to concentrate on staying alive.” Not growing is a symptom of dying, not the core problem. As any old person who has lived long enough to begin to lose height. It isn’t the lost inch or two that is the problem, the problem is being old and close to dying.
“Staying alive” activities are (in order): superior customer service, staying close to customers to determine their needs and desires, creating reliable and innovative products, employee development, and (dead last by several lengths) marketing and sales. When you ask an ex-customer of a company that was once considered excellent why they now dislike or distrust that company, 99% of the time I’d bet the answer will be “they treated me like crap.” Poor customer service will flip a loyal customer to a hater in a few seconds. That kind of hater will spread poisonous word-of-mouth stories that no marketing plan could ever keep up with. There is an old restaurant management rule that says something like “It takes $50 in advertising to get a new customer to try your business, 5 seconds of poor service to lose them, and $5,000 in advertising to get them to try you again.” The cost of poor service is under-rated, often ignored, and when it has gone on too long there is no road back for the company. No one can afford to spend $5,000 to attract a customer for a $20 meal.
22 years ago, I started my RatsEyeView.com (a domain I gave up a few years ago) business page and this blog to attract customers to the business consulting companies I worked for. I was a sub-contractor, most often, for D&H Consulting out of Rancho Santa Fe, CA working with an old friend from California on improving quality management and inventory control. I didn’t last long, 3 or 4 projects I think. It was soon apparent to me that in the early 2000s the corporate rewards were going to mismanagers who could downsize operations to little more than marketing and sales, passing off manufacturing and service to overseas manufacturers and contract companies. What these CEOs and other corner-office creeps wanted to hear was “How much do you like my poetry?” The only "improvement" they had in mind was in their own salary and perks. Almost universally, these mismanagers were all proud holders of the most worthless degree in academia, the MBA. Someone once said that you could sum up the entirety of a Harvard MBA with “Push blame down and pull credit up.” If any of the corporate “leaders” I consulted with had other skills, they did not display them around me. Every one of the companies we worked with has since been absorbed by another entity now, most at bargain basement prices. The CEOs, though, made out like the bandits they are.The businesses and employees were trashed like they were the disposable private property of the executives and, usually, the stockholders got the shaft too.
Why people like that keep getting hired is impossible to explain. Killing a business ought to be a scarlet letter on an executive’s resume, but it doesn’t work that way. Corporate American seems to protect and reward the really major failures. Which is why our companies keep dying while they focus on growth and keep over-paying executives who don’t produce revenue or customer satisfaction.
Go figure.
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