Growth Challenges Quotes

I don't think pain is a prerequisite for growth, but on the other hand, most of us choose very painful ways to learn.

Growth is a painful process.

When you get big, there's a tendency to get caught up in process and bureaucracy.

Pain is important, and changing who you are is difficult, painful, and scary. Most of the self-help industry sees change as this euphoric, liberating thing and tells you that you can be happy all the time. I think the opposite.

The more successful the unit, the more difficult it is to make sure that the large company doesn't put the same expectations on it as it does for the rest of the company. When it's a new venture, whether it's outside or inside the business, it's a child. And you don't put a 40-pound pack on a 6-year-old's back when you take her hiking.

We had grown too fast at PayPal. Our operating expenses had grown too fast... Growth covers a lot of sin. We want to grow without sin.

Somehow, the company must stay true to the founding vision while avoiding the pitfalls of rapid growth - and perhaps survive the hiring of a previously successful executive who doesn't work out.

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.

When companies get bigger they try to replicate their success. But they assume their magic came from process. They try to use processes to substitute content.

Unusually rapid growth cannot keep up forever; when a company has already registered a brilliant expansion, its very increase in size makes a repetition of its achievement more difficult.

My first company, Pure Software, was exciting and innovative in the first few years and bureaucratic and painful in the last few before it got acquired. The problem was we tried to systemize everything and set up perfect procedures.

Entrepreneurs, guys that start businesses, grow with them. It's more painful than it would appear.

Growth is often a painful process.

As you grow, the productivity I think, goes down with the square of the number of employees if you don't make an effort.

It made a lot of sense to me that the music part of our site would work for filmmakers as well. They'll be able to upload clips. There will be a section where you can watch what they are doing. They'll tell where their screenings are. It took a lot longer than we wanted to because we were growing so fast.

One of the great drivers of the alienation that has made Donald Trump possible is that the growth in the American economy has been weak. In the decade from 2005 to 2015, there was not one year when the US hit three per cent growth. And to the extent there's been growth, virtually all of it has been collected by the top 10 per cent of the population. Obviously, if we knew how to make growth faster, we would. We don't. And it's very difficult to make growth more broadly shared. Because it's not just the US that has this problem.

Civilizations, I believe, come to birth and proceed to grow by successfully responding to successive challenges. They break down and go to pieces if and when a challenge confronts them that they fail to meet.

If you're growing very rapidly, it doesn't matter if you make mistakes, in a way, because the growth kind of bails you out.

As you grow, it feels hopelessly corporate but it really is worth putting in place these compensation bands.

When the business grows, the person who founded it is incredibly busy. Rapid growth puts an enormous strain on a business. You outgrow your production facilities. You outgrow your management capabilities.

As leaders, we've all seen the painful effects of team members not keeping pace with company growth - it's called up-leveling, and it's all too common when a company goes from zero to something to hopefully an IPO.

As a company grows from 25 to 50 to 100 to 200 to 500 to 1000 people, the characteristics of who is the very best talent in leadership roles will change. It's rarely the case that your leadership team at 1000 people is the same leadership team you had a 25 people.

Stress on fast growing companies comes from a lot of different places. The one that is often the largest, and creates the most second-order issues, is the composition of the leadership team. More specifically, it's specific people on the leadership who don't have the scale experience their role requires at a particular moment in time.

If you bring that scrappy fierceness with you it works until you get big, when really pushing all the way really feels uncomfortable...When you're the little guy that's lauded, that's heroic.

In any business that grows big on one business model, transitions can throw everything in the air.