SECTION ONE

KEY Nọ 1:
THERE’S MORE
THAN ONE WAY TO
DEFINE GROWTH

“DECIDE WHAT YOU WANT,

DECIDE WHAT YOU ARE

WILLING TO EXCHANGE FOR IT.

ESTABLISH YOUR PRIORITIES

AND GO TO WORK.”

H. L. Hunt

“THERE ARE MANY WAYS OF

GOING FORWARD, BUT ONLY

ONE WAY OF STANDING STILL.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt

OUR OBSESSION WITH SIZE creates a number of challenges for the owner of a small business: perceptual challenges regarding the relationship between size and success, for example, as well as the assumption that a business must grow quantitatively or die, a business commandment Inc. Magazine featured as a New Economy Myth.¹ For the steward of a big-vision small business, the conflict between an internally motivated desire to build a distinguished organization and the externally motivated desire to create a company that is successful according to cultural norms can be significant, even paralyzing; it is the golden carrot that can lure us down the wrong path, where we may well find that the sparkling gold was merely a thin, colored-foil wrapper.

So how might we know the difference between the real golden carrot and the foil-covered one? This awareness—between the genuine and the superficial, the qualitative and the quantitative—is one factor that sets the big-vision small-business owner apart from her or his small-business peers. This section will begin to explore the distinctions between small and large enterprises and between qualitative and quantitative growth, and how all of these issues play out in the day-to-day lives of big-vision, small-business owners.