- Is your company so small you have to do everything for yourself? Wait until you’re so big that you can’t. That’s worse.
Michael Bloomberg (b.1942) U.S. entrepreneur, business executive and Mayor of New York. Bloomberg by Bloomberg (co-written with Matthew Winkler; 1997)
- Growth does not always lead a business to build on success. All too often it converts a highly successful business into a mediocre large business.
Richard Branson (b.1950) British entrepreneur, business executive and founder of the Virgin Group. Speech to the Institute of Directors, London.”Growing Bigger While Still Staying Small” (May 1993)
- The long-accepted goal of the enterprise as being profit-maximisation is surely and steadily being replaced by that of survival and growth objectives.
- K. Chakraborty (b.1957) Indian academic. Management by Objectives: An Integrated Approach (1976)
- If you had asked me seven or eight years ago whether there is such a thing as a company that’s growing too fast, I probably would have said no. All growth is good and you cannot grow a company too fast. But we learned that this is absolutely not true-there is a level of growth that is not only too fast but dangerous and deadly to a company.
Michael Dell (b.1965) U.S. chairman and C.E.O. of Dell Computer Corporation. Speech to the Society of American Business Editors and Writers Technology Conference, Dallas. “Maximum Speed: Lessons Learned from Managing Hypergrowth” (September 10, 1998)
- The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.
George Eliot (1819-80) British novelist. Daniel Deronda (1876)
- There are as many foolhardly ways to grow as there are to downsize.
Gary Hamel (b.1954) U.S. academic, business writer, and consultant. Digital Britain (January 2000)
- The growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest.
‘John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937) U.S. industrialist, philanthropist, and founder of Standard Oil. Quoted in Our Benevolent Feudalism (W. J. Ghent; 1902)
- When you consider something “ideal,” you lose the opportunity to improve it.
Shoji Shiba (b.1933) Japanese academic and author. Quoted in “Toyota’s Fresh Look at JIT [just-In-Time],” Financial Times (London) (September 10, 1990)
- I think you have to place bets and not predict growth rates.
Jack Welch (b.1935) U.S. former chairman and C.E.O. of General Electric. Leaders (1993)
- If you’re interested in creating sustainable growth, sustainable productivity, sustainable morale, you can’t do that through autocracy. You can work the numbers for a quarter or a half a year, you can drive people to exhaustion for a few months or a couple of years. But if you haven’t focused on creating capacity in the organization, it will die through those efforts.
Walter Wriston (b.1919) U.S. banker. Interview with Scott London, U.S. National Public Radio (November 1996)
