From time to time I look back at something I wrote on this blog years ago. It sometimes feels like I’m reading the words of a completely different person whom I barely recognize. Other times it seems like past me knew exactly what he was talking about.
Back in June of 2003 I wrote a post in which I tried to explain something of a self-revelation that I had recently experienced. I had felt a moment of tangible… disgust I guess, regarding a cliched phrase that was then and remains today distressingly common.
Have you ever heard “if you’re not growing, you’re dying“? This innocent phrase, at least as interpreted by late stage capitalism, is a rallying cry for never-ending growth in revenue and profits. We are to believe that any business, or individual for that matter, that isn’t making more profit each year than they did before is a ‘failing’ enterprise.
This falls in line with the theory of shareholder value maximization for which Milton Friedman is famous. The ‘Friedman Doctrine’ basically says that any executive’s primary and only fiduciary duty is to increase shareholder value i.e.: raise the stock price. The only way to do this reliably is to perpetually increase profits.
This concept sickened me in 2003 as it leads inevitably to a mindset where profitable companies cannibalize their own people, infrastructure, and product quality in a toxic mandate towards perpetual growth. Making a good product with good people and good processes at a steady profit is never good enough to satisfy this perspective. If your profit was 10% today and is 10% tomorrow, you are a failure.
Of course every individual and every company should strive towards improvement. But improvement often, possibly even most of the time, does not translate to higher financial gain (profit).
Crafting a perfectly made object almost inevitably costs more than making a shoddy piece of garbage. And a shoddy piece of garbage needs to be replaced almost immediately after being made, generating more sales and more profit. Cheap crap that breaks and is obsolete the day it comes out the door is inevitably more financially ‘advantageous’, at least in the short to mid term. And corporate entities never see beyond those limited timelines.
My thinking from 2003 about the phrase ‘if you are not growing, you are dying‘ is largely unchanged in 2025. Improvement should be our never-ending goal, not growth. Perpetual growth in profit margins is a destructive and toxic objective. Yet I still hear the ‘growth equals survival’ phrase far too frequently.
I would say that my perspective on this has actually hardened in the past 20 years. Whenever I observe anyone expressing the belief that never-ending growth is the best quality of an enterprise I immediately question whether the speaker is a sociopath or just ignorant. Unfortunately, almost every corporate entity works on this basis, and the concept that shareholder profit supersedes all other concerns is baked into our fundamental corporate leadership mantras.