Move Fast and Grow at All Costs?

We've bought all-in to the "move fast and break things" mantra and combined it with a growth-at-all-costs mindset.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote the “We All Just Need to Chill” post and focused on our always-on connectivity and how it is, to paraphrase, melting our brains. We are all simply too online and it’s getting in the way of our productivity. When you burn the candle at both ends, the wicks eventually meet in the middle.

But there’s another factor contributing to this and it is the speed at which we are working. We take the view that we have to move as quickly as possible and combine it with the late-stage capitalistic mantra of growth at all costs, forming a toxic sludge of perceived productivity in the short-term while ignoring the glaring long-term effects.

Buckle up - this post is a bit of a ride. (DALL-E 3)

Move Fast and Break Things

It’s very trendy within organizations to borrow a phrase from Mark Zuckerberg from the early days of Facebook and to tell their employees to “move fast and break things.” The underlying notion being don’t be afraid of failure; take a calculated risk in a good faith attempt to make the company better and if it fails that’s okay, at least you tried.

And this is a noble sentiment. In fact, being able to handle failure at work is crucial to growth and is an essential skill if you want to be a good leader and an effective manager. At its purest, “move fast and break things” makes sense.

But this is the real world, and the purest of intentions in the workplace get stepped on. Not everyone deals with failure (and the ensuing blame) the same way, and it’s crucial to understand how you and your colleagues approach it. There’s three main personality types when it comes to blame:

• Extrapunitive: It’s everyone else’s faults, not mine;

• Impunitive: It didn’t fail, or if it did I didn’t play a role in it;

• Intropunitive: It failed (even if it didn’t) and it’s my fault.

Knowing your typical approach to blame and your boss’s approach will help you assess how pure a notion of MFABT you’re truly operating within.

Growth at All Costs

When a boss says MFABT, what they really mean is they want success, and fast. And sometimes this is necessary - I think back to FDR and his drive to get America out of the Great Depression. He threw a ton of stuff at the wall to see what stuck, which is how we got things like the SEC, the CCC, and the PWA. His New Deal was so successful upon taking office, it had a sequel and created Social Security.

But your boss isn’t FDR (even if you think they’re flirting with fascism), and your company isn’t one of the greatest superpowers on earth who has to maintain stability not only internally but on the world stage to eventually defeat one of the most evil men to rise to power in modern history.

But you do work at a company, and it’s very likely that your boss, and your boss’s boss, are being pressured for year over year growth. Hell, they may be getting flak for not growing fast enough quarter over quarter. And these are symptoms of the larger disease of short-termism that public companies widely suffer from today.

Quarterly reports showing growth - not long-term fiscal health or overall stability - become the only strategic guideline and firms get caught in this quarterly cycle that is extremely difficult from which to extract oneself. CFOs are going down with the ship into the quarterly whirlpool over and over again, created by growth targets set by Wall Street analysts and investors - and they’re bringing the rest of the company along for the ride.

Want to go down a rabbit hole? Black holes in the ocean. You’re welcome. (DALL-E 3)

Can Growth Be Infinite?

Unless your company is Robert Wadlow, infinite growth is not something necessarily on the menu. But leaders continue to act like hypertrophied pituitary glands and continue to push growth at nearly all costs. It didn’t work for Robert and it may not be right for companies, either.

As I think back to how many times a company can have quarterly growth, I keep coming back to the law of conservation of mass. Matter can be neither created nor destroyed - Earth is working with a finite amount of it. It’s the reason our planet weighed the same when the isle of Manhattan was covered in woodlands versus when it was built up into massive skyscrapers. The trippiest part of this Nat Geo write up is the following:

Atoms that were in a dinosaur millions of years ago—and in a star billions of years before that—may be inside you today.

"I really hope future species don’t use our decaying bodies for planet-ruining petroleum products.” (DALL-E 3)

But I digress. All of this begs the question: is money - which is, essentially, an entirely made-up human concept not actually tethered to anything real (thanks Tricky Dick) - infinite? One of the reasons the foreign currency exchange laid out at Bretton Woods fell apart was that the global economy tripled in size while the supply of gold didn’t really change - to continue the growth, we had to untether ourselves from a finite resource.

No more Bretton Woods. No more Old Man of the Mountain. New Hampshire only has Weirs Beach left. (DALL-E 3)

Without being aligned with something physical that has to follow the law of conservation of mass, money and growth can be infinite if the underlying ingredients for it are there - namely, demand. One of the only reasons we can talk about the idea of infinite growth is because of the population explosion that has occurred post-WWII across the globe.

But population growth is not infinite and will peak in the 2080s. And a large driver of that growth - China - has actually already peaked and has been overtaken by rival India, whose economy has enough differences with China’s that growth on the same scale we saw the last 30 years is not guaranteed. The world - and its attached economies - are changing in ways that will dramatically change the status quo. Are companies myopically focused on growth ready?

Move Purposefully and Do the Work Right

Knowing growth, like the supply of gold after the Paris Peace Treaties, is not infinite, companies will need to find a way to figure out what equilibrium looks like. Sure, the 2080s are very far away, but soft landing or not, we’re already seeing a maturity in the established global economy that is slowing growth.

And this is where the growth at all costs theorem fails. Growth is not bad, but like everything else, it has its time and place. Some years will be slower than others. What if companies dedicated capex to fixing internal systems that don’t actually contribute to top or bottom line in the short term but are necessary to keep the company functional? What if they focused on the nuts and bolts of the business and not financial wizardry to hit numbers? What if they took a step (even a half-step) back and said “Wait, this is nowhere near sustainable and also this guy is clearly not the person to lead this”?

As problems get more and more complex we would all be served by simply slowing down and meeting our objectives purposefully. Growth for growth’s sake doesn’t make a lot of sense (unless you’re a large shareholder) and usually isn’t sustainable. But growth with purpose - and a meaningful approach to when and what kind of growth is appropriate - is something companies who want to be around for the long-term should heed. After all, even Jack Welch - one of the fathers of shareholder value maximization - had himself disavowed the practice.

Grab Bag Sections

WTF Governor Hochul: We all know the subway in NYC could certainly be improved. This newsletter sees the issues as more infrastructure-based, as the system has been under-invested in for decades. But our politicians aren’t playing to the facts; they’re playing to fear - the basest of political motivators. Crime in the subway is down, but that hasn’t stopped the state’s governor from deploying state troopers and National Guard soldiers to erode the 4th amendment for daily subway riders. This newsletter would rather see the tax dollars spent combatting the true issues underlying the perception of increased subway crime: addiction and mental health issues plaguing our most vulnerable populations, which is helping fuel an insane rise in teen violence.

Album of the Week: If you had tried to sell an album that was pitched as a rock opera about teenagers trying to get laid with a tenuous tie to Peter Pan, you would be laughed out of record companies across America. If you were Jim Steinman and Meat Loaf, you were.

Ok so you don’t like rock operas. What if I told you the album cover was absolutely bitchin’?

They had a very tough time getting labels to sign onto this album and on its face it makes sense. Even the augur of Arista Clive Davis passed on them (he did it in such a cruel way, it prompted Meat Loaf to stand outside Davis’s offices on the street yelling “Fuck you, Clive!”)

But Messrs. Loaf and Steinman had the last laugh - they eventually did get someone to buy the album and got it played around the world until finally the US market woke up and decided to put some effort in getting the word out for Bat Out of Hell. The rest is history.

The highlights are the nearly 10-minute intro, “You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth”, “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad”, and “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” The last track had Phil Rizzuto claiming he doesn’t know about the base system (yeah, okay) and one of the funniest lines in rock when Meat Loaf sings “I'm praying for the end of time / It's all that I can do / Praying for the end of time, / So I can end my time with you.” Buy a copy, but try to buy it used so the labels that didn’t believe in one of the best-selling albums of all time don’t get a dime from it.

Quote of the Week: “It’s hard to get a man to understand something when he is being paid not to understand it.” - Upton Sinclair

See you next week!