Tool Box
Issue No. 38 - December/January 07/08
How to mature gracefully without losing your edge
by Rudy Pieck
Your business is now established and generating cash. The bank that once needed careful persuading to lend you money has become much more forthcoming.
The fact that this change has come just when you no longer need such help strikes you as ironic.
Your management team is stable and management systems – appraisal mechanisms, performance-related remuneration and the like – are being implemented and becoming part of the routine. Your business, in short, is passing through its third phase of growth: it is maturing.
The maturing company may still be growing fast but it is also growing up. This is when it professionalises its management and the ‘suits’ accordingly begin to have a big impact.
An important challenge in this phase is to introduce management systems without squeezing the life out of the business. It is naïve to assume that a substantial business can exist with no organisational infrastructure. But the worries associated with underpinning a flexible, self-adjusting organisation with something seemingly rigid and impersonal have led many a company founder to defer a change of approach for far longer than is healthy.
Family businesses, where blood is thicker than water, are particularly likely to defer professionalising management.
On the other hand, it is possible to professionalise and systematise too much, too soon.
Premature ageing in an organisation is almost as worrying as a refusal to let an org...
