In business - as in nature - there are only two states: you’re growing, or you’re dying. This isn't just a bold metaphor. It’s an operating principle that shapes everything from your leadership to your bottom line.
It might feel counterintuitive, even unsettling. After all, shouldn’t stability be a good thing? A sign you’ve arrived?
But in a constantly shifting world, “staying the same” is a myth. Standing still is regression in slow motion. The pace of change in markets, technology, and customer expectations means that even maintaining your current level of performance requires you to keep moving forward. Growth is the cost of survival.
The Illusion of “Enough”
Many business leaders reach a point where growth starts to feel optional. They’ve hit financial goals, grown their team, carved out market share. From that vantage point, further growth can seem unnecessary - greedy, even.
But ask yourself: has your market stopped evolving? Have your people stopped developing? Have your competitors stopped innovating?
The idea that there’s a stable plateau where everything holds still simply doesn’t hold up. Growth isn’t about greed - it’s about relevance. The most enduring businesses know that growth is a constant process of refinement, learning, and problem-solving. Not because more is always better, but because the alternative is decay.
Choose Your Own Growth Path
Here’s where it gets more personal: you have a choice in how fast you grow.
Not all growth needs to be rapid or aggressive. The pace should be sustainable - for you and for your team. Burnout doesn’t lead to breakthroughs. But growth must still be happening. Even small, steady improvements - if consistent - can lead to remarkable progress over time.
Enjoying the journey matters. The best growth cultures are the ones where people feel challenged but supported, ambitious but grounded. If growth feels like a constant uphill battle, it might not be the speed that’s wrong - but the strategy.
Don't Chase Someone Else’s Trajectory
One of the biggest traps leaders fall into is comparison.
There’s always another business scaling faster, raising more capital, landing bigger clients. But businesses, like people, grow at different speeds and in different directions. The comparison game is not only unproductive - it’s often misleading.
Your path is yours. Your stage of growth, your challenges, your wins - they’re not supposed to mirror anyone else’s. “Comparison is the thief of joy” isn’t just a quote - it’s a warning. Growth loses meaning when it becomes about catching up rather than moving forward with purpose.
What Growth Really Looks Like
We often mistake the map for the territory. Revenue, headcount, margin - these are indicators, not the essence, of growth. Real growth shows up in how your team thinks, how your culture evolves, and how well your business adapts.
It’s not just external success - it’s internal development. The best businesses are constantly experimenting, reflecting, and refining. They generate new ideas (conjecture) and test them in real-world conditions (criticism). They ask hard questions and use data to find better answers. That’s the engine of true progress.
Economic growth, organisational growth, personal growth - all follow this same loop. It’s the natural order. Businesses that stop iterating stop improving. Eventually, they get outcompeted by those that kept going.
Problems Are the Proof of Progress
If it feels like every solved problem just leads to the next one, you’re not failing - you’re growing.
Eliyahu Goldratt, in The Goal, laid this out clearly: business is a process of ongoing improvement. Each breakthrough exposes the next bottleneck. That’s the nature of growth - it moves the frontier forward.
This mindset shift is essential. Stop expecting the problems to go away. Welcome them. They’re evidence you’re on the right path. A problem-free business is a stagnant one - and stagnation is just a slow death.
Can Your Business Grow If You Don’t?
The most important growth lever in any organisation is its people. You can’t expect the business to evolve if its leaders and team members are standing still. And often, the reluctance to grow isn’t about strategy - it’s about fear, fatigue, or a flawed belief that growth is somehow unnecessary or wrong.
So ask yourself:
Are you pursuing growth or avoiding it?
Are you measuring the right kind of progress - or just chasing vanity metrics?
Are you helping your team grow, or expecting results without development?
Are you building something great - or just managing something good?
Growth isn’t a straight line. It’s a commitment to constant improvement. And it begins with a choice: to move forward, to learn, and to lead.
Because while growth might not always be comfortable, neither is decline. And in business, comfort is rarely the safest place to be.