Managing the Predictable Problems of Growth

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The Crystal Ball of Growth

Managing growth would be a lot easier if you could peer into the future and see exactly what would happen to your company if you doubled or tripled in size. Unfortunately, magic crystal balls only exist in science fiction and fairly tales, right?

Not so, says Vistage speaker and organizational development expert Ian MacDougall .

He asserts that you can know about many organizational problems in advance, and therefore plan ahead to minimize their impact on your company. All it takes is an understanding of organizational life cycle principles and the ability to identify in your company the characteristic traits of each growth phase.

“As organizations grow, they move through a series of distinct phases that make up the organizational life cycle,” explains MacDougall. “Some phases involve growth, others involve decline, but each has a unique set of identifying characteristics and problems that befall all companies who enter it. More important, these problems are unchanging and highly predictable. Every growing company — regardless of size, industry, or age — sooner or later runs head-on into these inevitable challenges.

“The good news is that by knowing where your business stands in the life cycle, you can identify these major barriers to growth before they occur. You can’t eliminate them because they are direct results of the previous stage’s growth. But you can do a much better job of managing them and thereby facilitate your company’s evolution to the next growth phase.”

The five growth stages in the organizational life cycle are courtship, infancy, go-go, adolescence and prime….

Read more on every stage in the organizational life cycle at http://www.vistage.com.my/experience/tools-and-resources/content-library/managing-the-predictable-problems-of-growth/