ABOUT GROWTH
Journal of Business Strategy
Growth. (The Last Word).
A recession, which everybody seems to agree is the economy's current state, means growth prospects for business are less than rosy. (Officially, "recession" is defined as: "A temporary downturn in economic activity, usually indicated by two consecutive quarters of a falling GDP.") Given that reality, we now take a moment to reflect on what growth is, what it means, and what its downsides are.
"What is the most rigorous law of our being? Growth. No smallest atom of our moral, mental, or physical structure can stand still a year. It grows--it must grow; nothing can prevent it." Mark Twain
"All growth depends upon activity. There is no development ... without effort, and effort means work." Calvin Coolidge
"All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous, unpremeditated act without benefit of experience." Henry Miller
"The growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest." John D. Rockefeller
"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." Edward Abbey
"Since life is growth and motion, a fixed point of view kills anybody who has one." Brooks Atkinson
"Growth, in some curious way, I suspect, depends on being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another." Norman Mailer
"Today [1959] convenience is the success factor of just about every type of product and service that is showing steady growth." Charles C Mortimer
"Growth is the only evidence of life." John Henry Newman
"Do you want my one-word secret of happiness--It's growth--mental, financial, you name it." Harold S. Geneen
"Growth demands a temporary surrender of security." Gail Sheehy
"If it's notgrowing, it's going to die." Michael Eisner
"There are no such things as limits to growth, because there are no limits on the human capacity for intelligence, imagination and wonder." Ronald Reagan
"Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists." Noam Chomsky
"The dinosaur's eloquent lesson is that if some bigness is good, an overabundance of bigness is not necessarily better." Eric Johnston