If you don’t measure it, it won’t get better

1-minute read

Stop harping on growth

The Alter of Growth needs to be toppled over. Obsession with growth (and more broadly, the dominance of shareholder value as a metric) is unrealistic and leads to troublesome outcomes. Facebook, for example, is in use by nearly all global internet users. To expect them to grow much more is toxic.

Arguably Facebook (in reducing addictive interactions and fake news) and Twitter (in closing fake accounts) are taking better steps as companies than they have in a long time. But there is no metric for that positive movement. Only doom and gloom over growth.

The business world needs metrics for other values, and they need to be held up next to metrics like growth and share price to create a balanced picture of the organization, the market, and ideally the wellbeing of employees/partners/suppliers.