Growth for the sake of growth doesn’t interest us. For us, growth is a way of upping the game, a means of taking on gradually harder things to do. So that, we get stronger and tougher to break and become more capable of adding more value to our customers.
We reject the widely held notions of business growth – that organizations grow or die, and that growth should be predictable and smooth. Nothing in life is. We embrace instead, the belief that our preparation and readiness for it should drive the pace of our growth.
Our outlook on growth is similar to how a performance artist, an athlete, a sports team, or an elite fighting unit strives for higher levels of competence and performance. Growth is an aspiration to do better business. A business that is right for us and we are right for; growth is not a chain that shackles us, forcing us to unhealthy commitments.
Growth in numbers – be it our headcount or revenues is not what we deliberately pursue as an end in itself. We instead seek to build and enable an internal growth system, one that aligns strategy, structure, and systems and drives the engagement and performance of our people. Focus and insight drive our growth, not arbitrary goals.
We free our people to identify opportunities to add increasing value to our customers. We demand a fair price for the value we provide. We experiment and learn by making small bets on our hypotheses, and then as a firm, figure out where our growth comes from and how.
We avoid the trap that organizations fall into, pursuing business that is a poor fit for them, in order to feed the monster they create. We will not let careless growth jeopardize the trust and respect we command from our customers.