Excerpts from Bigger Isn't Always Better By Robert M. Tomasko

Bigger Is Not Necessarily Better How to Think About Growth What Australians Can Teach Americans About Growth Are You a Fixer or a Grower? Chapter 3: Growth Is About Moving Forward

Bigger Is Not Necessarily Better   In a world where too many businesses seems locked in a take-no-prisoners struggle to super size, it is time to reconsider what viable growth really entails. Too often it has become confused with one of its by-products, expansion. Getting bigger may be a by-product of growth, but it is not its main feature. A business that takes the short-cut of pursuing size increase directly ­ instead of realizing it through the hard work of real growth ­ is like an athlete taking the steroid route to muscle building. Bigness is like self-esteem. It is a wonderful feeling when acquired as a by-product of doing well and achieving one's goals. When gotten this way, it can even serve as a flywheel to generate more success. But the kind of self-esteem that comes from blind optimism and putting a happy face on failure is brittle and unanchored. It tends to do more harm than good. Peter Pan companies are those that substitute getting big for growing up. They become blinded by grandiosity, and fall victim to the five horsemen of the business world apocalypse: ego centrism, invulnerability, omnipotence, omniscience, and unrealistic optimism. Bigger is not necessarily better. Bigness begets business bubbles and bullies. It bites back, too. A single-minded focus on getting bigger usually has the opposite effect. Companies that successfully seek it soon find their surroundings become less hospitable, resources less abundant and organizations less functional. At some point it is important for every rapidly expanding organization to ask: where does real business-building end and counterproductive empire-building take its place? Growth is about forward movement, stretching beyond the limits that currently define and constrain. It is not about getting bigger or holding a record of unbroken success. Real growth involves reaching full potential, not maximum size. It happens when old dominating ideas are challenged, and new ones displace them. Growth means progress, not excess; it is fueled by imagination, not expansion.   Adapted from the Introduction Bigger Isn't Always Better: The New Mindset for Real Business Growth, By Robert M. Tomasko (AMACOM, 2006)

How to Think About Growth     A few months ago I finished writing Bigger Isn't Always Better. Most surveyors can safely ignore the book's first two chapters. These warn of the pitfalls of going after bigness instead of real growth. That's how business bubbles and bullies are created. It's the kind of growth that doesn't last, either. It bites back, blurring a business' focus and creating a beacon for aggressive regulators like Eliot Spitzer. What surveyors will find more useful is the subject of the book's next 10 chapters ­ what smart growth really is and what's needed to bring it about.   Smart Growth Urban planners like to distinguish between smart and dumb growth. Dumb growth, extending a city with mile-after-mile of quarter-acre subdivisions built helter-skelter throughout the adjacent countryside is usually a formula for sprawl-and-crawl, over-stretched and uneconomic public services, and environmental degradation. Encouraging denser development along established transit corridors ­ smart growth ­ leads to shorter commutes, more affordable housing and economically sustainable cities. More space is available for public parks, too. The key differentiator is sustainability ­ growth that meets the needs of the present without compromising the future. If we label "getting bigger" as dumb growth, what counts as smart growth in the business world? Or, to put it another way, where should all the energy, creativity and resources that are spent pursuing bigness, unwise mergers, and dubious synergies really go? A more useful definition of growth is one built around becoming "better," not bigger. A business grows whenever it moves beyond the self-imposed limits that define and constrain it. Growth is about forward movement. It is not about getting bigger or holding a record of unbroken success. Getting bigger may be a by-product of growth, but it is not its main feature. A business that takes the short-cut of pursuing size increase directly ­ instead of realizing it through the hard work of real growth ­ is like an athlete taking the steroid route to muscle building. Real growth involves reaching full potential, not maximum size. It happens when old dominating ideas are challenged, and new ones displace them. Growth means progress, not excess; it is fueled by imagination, not expansion. - When Howard Schultz focused on selling his customers an experience, not just a good cup of coffee, Starbucks grew. - When Darcy Winslow championed a range of products for women that did not fit into the testosterone-defined market segments that had come to define her employer, Nike grew. - When Bill Greenwood found a way to turn truckers, his railroad's most troublesome competitors, into its best customers by putting their trailers on his trains, the Burlington Northern grew. - When Roger Enrico set his company on its own course, rather than defining it by its rivalry with Coca-Cola, Pepsico grew. - When Al Bru, one of Enrico's managers, spent $57 million to eliminate trans fats from Frito-Lay's snack foods, its owner, Pepsico, grew. - When Arkadi Kuhlmann created a bank with no fees, minimum deposits nor branches, a narrow range of handpicked products, and a willingness to reject customers if they were looking for services he did not want to provide, his company, ING Direct, showed it was possible to grow by challenging the central pillars of its industry's conventional wisdom. - When Yvon Chouinard dropped 30% of his clothing line, as runaway demand threatened to turn his outdoor sports apparel company into something he did not want it to be, a mass marketer, Patagonia simultaneously got smaller and grew.   Each of these growers gave attention to: 1. Disintegrating an old way of perceiving their situation. 2. Assimilating, first within themselves and then in their operation, a new perspective. 3. Building the capabilities needed to support it. 4. Reorienting their organization, and its surroundings, around this new possibility.   If you want to grow - not just expand - your business or practice, you need to do the same.     Fix the Status Quo or Surpass It? Simone de Beauvoir, a French writer, summed-up the nature of growth very well when she said:   "Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself....." "If all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying."   Some people seem to have a special mindset for the surpassing part of this equation - an ability to move things forward, generate effective action, and take a situation beyond what was there before. They are lighters-of-candles, not cursers of darkness. I like to call people who are especially good at employing this mindset growers. By looking closely at how they think and act we all can become better at making new things happen and creating the kind of business we most want to see. If growers were better appreciated and understood, more recognized and cultivated, then the organizations where they work would accomplish more. Cultivating a growth mindset certainly beats the alternative: a life, or career, spent being whipsawed by forces we can only resist, respond to, or react against. If all we do is maintain ourselves, Beauvoir observed, then living is only "not dying." Resistance, response and reaction are ways of coping, of getting-by. They are escalating commitments to the status quo. Many situations call for these behaviors; short-term survival in the face of immediate danger, in fact, depends on them. But growth doesn't. Business is not just about fixing what is broken. It is about taking what is best in your enterprise and nurturing its further development. Leading this kind of growth requires a very different mentality than needed to manage ongoing activities. The best growth champions in the business world are often not the people in charge of today's successful organizations. Often what makes best sense to sustain the status quo is irrelevant or counterproductive to surpassing it. Not everyone has the special talent needed to create a new future. For many of us, our efforts are better directed at reacting and responding to events as they unfold. At times the growing and maintaining orientations seem in conflict with each other; other times they are mutually supportive. This is understandable. Creating the world that we most want to have necessitates a mindset very different from that required to react to the one we do. The logic behind avoiding unpleasant and feared consequences is not the same as that which guides a builder of something better.     The Inner Game of Growth What all growers have in common is a stronger interest in building over maintaining. They all share, to varying degrees, a common mindset, the mindset of a grower. What is a mindset? It is how you think about what you are doing. It's your internal logic system, the model of the world you carry around in your head. Your mindset gives birth to your beliefs and assumptions. It determines what facts you notice and what you make of them. And, even more important, what you do as a result. Growth happens when new challenges are taken on and new capabilities are created or added to meet them. For this to take place in an organization, the same process must be going on in the people working within it. Businesses seldom experience sustainable growth unless those within them do also. The desire to acquire new skills and face tougher challenges motivates growth just as greed and grandiosity are the drivers of bigness. People wanting to grow a business need an urge to grow themselves as persons first. Growers are people who need challenge the way we all need air. Without it they are restless and bored; with it they are gratified because they have an opportunity to show what they are made of by using or expanding their potential. Tim Gallwey, author of the best seller The Inner Game of Tennis, provides a useful perspective on mastering growth. His approach to learning tennis, and other skill-related endeavors, suggests that success requires mastery of an "inner" and an "outer" game. There is both an outer and an inner game of growth, also. The outer is a game of technique - market research, product development, branding, sales closing, and customer service. It deals with core competencies, disruptive technologies, and synergies. Techniques, important are they are, convey at best only fleeting advantage. They are easily replicable, and can be learned, and improved on, by your opponents. The inner game of growth is different. It's a mindset game. It is where the real leverage is. This is a game whose moves have to do with noticing opportunities where others see only obstacles, turning these openings into growth goals, and then rallying support around them. It's a game that feeds on brutal candor about your business' current situation, and emotional ardor about its future prospects. It's a game of momentum and resilience, one whose best players also know when it's time to shift gears and share the wealth. Growers are people skilled in both games. They want more than maintaining equilibrium. They are people who want to bring new things into being. Some start revolutions. Others nudge evolution along. These are people with a healthy measure of discomfort with the status quo, usually because they are able to foresee something better - something they are able to move toward and encourage others to want. What they do, and how they do it, is a subject worthy of close examination.     The Growth Mindset Growers, regardless of the business or profession they are in, are especially good at seven things. They know how to: Step back from themselves. Growth is a narcissism-free zone. Being able to step back from yourself, from your ego, your self-image, is the best way to stay open to new opportunities and to change course as circumstances require. It's an ability Herb Kelleher, of Southwest Airlines had, GE's Jack Welch flirted with, and Enron's Ken Lay lacked. Wise growers have the ability to see things as others see them, allowing them to anticipate the reactions others will have to their moves. They are as sensitive to their surroundings as they are to their intentions. They know they are part of a broader marketplace that may not necessarily revolve around them and their immediate needs. Avoid letting their memory block their vision. Growers notice changes in their surroundings that others miss because they see what's really there, not just what they expected to find before they looked. They know the topography of their minds isn't always an accurate map of the contours of the marketplace. Growers spot new opportunities by looking at what they do from the outside-in. They turn off their brain's autopilot and put themselves in the shoes of their clients when they seek opportunities to grow. Cultivate positive emotions. Growers focus on the hopeful features in their environment. Their glasses are always half full. They make use of a positive mood to jolt their thinking. Positive emotions make us more open to the forest, not the trees. They are a source of "cognitive glue." We are more creative when we are happy because that's when new information is more likely to connect with what's already in our knowledge base ­ that's how our brain is wired. Negative emotions do the opposite. They drive us to hunker down and block our peripheral vision. We end up just reacting to immediate circumstances rather than creating new ones. Set clear, medium-range goals. Growers know what they want. They know about the power a goal has to change what is noticed, and to move people from possibility to action. Going from an opportunity to an objective is what gives a grower's vision its practical shape. The best goals walk the tight rope between being too vague and too specific, too soon and too far away, and too sterile and too cute. Tell the truth. Growers generate energy to move forward by keeping the gap between where they want to be and where they are constantly in mind. It's amazing how paying attention to the gap ends up making it smaller. But this only works when there is complete candor about what the current state of reality really is. This is not just a matter of veracity; our minds are often hard wired to distort reality. Growers know how to work around this pitfall. Master momentum and bounce. Momentum starts through a series of small wins. Get started by doing something ­ anything ­ in the direction of your growth goal. Fail early and often: motivation comes from action, it doesn't proceed it. Growers know how to snap-back, not snap, from setbacks by stepping back and learning from their errors. They don't bury them. When stymied, leaping-before-they-look is often the grower's best way to get to a place where the visibility is better. Know when to let go. The world, and the marketplace, is always changing. Every growth initiative eventually runs its course. That's when it's time to let go and move on to something else. Quitting while you are ahead is an underrated virtue. But it's the key to keeping yesterday's success from becoming today's millstone.   The best growers make a point of doing something in addition to all this. They share their wealth by distilling the lessons they've learned from their initiatives ­ both good and bad - and then spread the word their colleagues. That's why I wrote Bigger Isn't Always Better, and that's why I hope you'll attend industry conferences and contribute to publications like Empire State Surveyor to stimulate others in this field. It's the best way I know to keep a profession alive and growing.   Adapted from Empire State Surveyor March/April 2006

Are You a Fixer or a Grower?   Every organization - business, government or nonprofit - has two essential missions. It must maintain and preserve what it already does. It also must lay the groundwork for moving beyond the boundaries of its current activities. The first mission keeps the organization efficient and successful in today's world. The second ensures it will survive and thrive in tomorrows. One perfects the existing business formula; the other leads the charge to change it. Both missions are vital. Few companies can survive for long by paying attention to only one and ignoring the other, though in the short run they are rivals for attention and resources. What makes the pursuit of these dual missions so difficult is that the mindset, the basic assumptions required by each are so different. Mindsets are shortcuts we use to explain the world to ourselves. They are how we think about what we are doing, our internal logic system. They are the models of the world we carry around in our head. To make it easier to contrast the mindsets required by the twin-missions, let's give each a name. A "fixer" mindset is concerned with what needs to be done to maintain and preserve the business as it is, within the logic of its current dominating ideas. The "grower" perspective, in contrast, is focused on what is necessary to move beyond what currently exists. When the grower's mindset is employed, the business advances; when the fixer's is used, it keeps afloat. Both are worthy objectives. The Fixer Mindset Fixers know how to maintain and improve existing operations. They are the drivers of today's business model. Fixers keep the trains running on time. They are quick to spot any divergence from the plan. Fixers mount search-and-destroy missions to eliminate excess costs. They speed the flow of product to customers by streamlining critical business processes. They launch company-wide quality improvement campaigns. They live in the worlds of six-sigma and TQM, downsizing and reengineering. The fixer's idea of the future often looks like the past, only without all the imperfections. Fixers are determinists, they like to control events, and they put a great deal of energy into eliminating deviations from expected performance. Fixers like to see themselves as realists, practical people. They like to quantify things and feel there is an objective, measurable reality that may be apart from how some people perceive (or misperceive) the world. They deal with events as they come. The status quo is something they usually accept and try hard to work with, though they at times may feel skeptical or cynical about it. Sometimes they feel resigned to "muddle through" difficult situations, knowing that at best their efforts are likely to produce only incremental change. Fixers like to keep up with the latest management trends. They benchmark a lot, and are diligent seminar goers, constantly looking for new techniques that show promise to improve the working of the business. Fixers think linearly - their world is one of proximate causes and immediate effects. Fixers often feel uncomfortable in times of chaotic change. They are more content when all going on around them seems well under control. Future happenings, from their perspective, are largely determined by what has already occurred. They predict the future by looking at the past, always trying hard to stay keenly aware of the trends that are driving today's marketplace. The Grower Mindset The grower's model of the future is quite different. For them, it is not fixed or predetermined. Marketplaces, they believe, are constantly in motion, fundamentally open to new influences, and full of possibilities. Yesterday's story does not have to be tomorrow's, they will argue. They are good at listening for what seems to want to happen next in the market. Growers believe that few trends keep going forever, and that small discontinuities in established patterns may be all that is needed to change entire industries. They relish discovering, or creating, these discontinuities. And then they make plans to take advantage of what is about to happen. For them, opportunities are abundant to create something new, and they are always alert for serendipitous events that can provide leverage for their plans. Growers have a similar perspective about the organizations in which they work. They value their ability to discover openings and leverage points in these structures. They believe that many internal rigidities and conflicts are rooted in misperceptions, which are correctable. Change, growers maintain, can arise from inside the organization. It does not always need to be imposed externally. Different Goals; Contrasting Worldviews Fixers and growers inhabit the same world, but have contrasting assumptions about how to operate in it. Fixers are great problem solvers; they are good at making something go away. Success happens for them when the problem has disappeared. Growers focus more on what they want, rather than what they do not. They are opportunity-seizers more than problem-crushers. Success for a grower is the presence, not the absence, of a result. Growers are able to visualize an end result of their efforts, something that is hard to do with a fixer's goal such as "zero defects." Taking action to bring something new into being - the process of creation ­ is the standard operating mode of a grower. They want to go beyond what is now, rather than restore or perfect it. Growers are more concerned with "next practices" than best practices. Many fixer activities are directed internally and deal with things that have already happened. Growers direct their attention outside the organization and keep it more forward focused. Growers have a conviction that they can shape their own destiny, while fixers are more inclined to see themselves on the receiving end of circumstances outside their control. One is proactive, the other reactive. The fixer's environment provides the stimuli for their actions, as they react against or respond to their circumstances. Growers are more internally energized by what they want to bring into reality, what they want to add to their circumstances rather than take away. Have a conversation with a fixer and soon you will notice much of the discussion revolves around tactics, techniques and technology. Mention the future and you will soon hear the fixer's thoughts about forecasts and predictions. Discuss the same issues with a grower and you will find less said about what is likely to be and the mechanics needed to bring it about, and more about alternative ways things might work out and what would be required for each to occur. Growers like being on the initiating, the shaping end of change. They believe the best way to predict the future is to invent it. "Fixer" and "grower" are labels for mindsets, not people. But people are the creators and carriers of a mindset. Jack Welch frequently favored the fixer mentality. His successor at GE, Jeffrey Immelt, is more of a grower. Nissan's Carlos Ghosn is a switch-hitter. Are Growers Better than Fixers? Keep in mind what we have been talking about are mindsets, sets of assumptions, ways of thinking. Do you prefer to think like a fixer or a grower? Or both? Which mindset do you most commonly operate from? There is no right or wrong mindset: it all depends on what you want to accomplish. Ferreting out what is wrong and eliminating it is enabled by the vigilant mood of the fixer. The grower's more positive and spirited approach helps identify what is right in a situation and how to build on it. Shifting mindset requires first discerning which one is governing your actions, the ability to stand back from it and critically assess how appropriate it is for your aims, and then the courage to think differently about how the world seems to work. Organizations that successfully adapt to changes in their surroundings are the ones that know how to rally this kind of courage. I hope yours is among them.   Adapted from Chapter 4 Bigger Isn't Always Better: The New Mindset for Real Business Growth, By Robert M. Tomasko (AMACOM, 2006)

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