Alex Mondau, Director, Community Sourced Capital
We are delighted to cross-post here Alex's provocative exploration of the many ways that we can define enterprise "growth." He also challenges each of us to ask ourselves, how would we like to grow this year? This blog was originally posted at Community Sourced Capital. You can read the Field Guide story of Community Sourced Capital here.
Let’s start by asking a question: do businesses need to grow? I’ll cast my vote to say “Yes.” Actually, I will say “Absolutely.” Yet, there are many kinds of growth. We can grow up, we can grow out, and we can also grow wise. So let’s make sure we are talking about the same thing.
The economy we know today is pretty attached to a classic growth paradigm that demands growth, and mostly growth that manifests itself in growing revenue or profit or, in its largest sense, GDP. At the micro level, I witness this paradigm in action every time I hear the question, “How are you going to grow this business?” It’s a call you can’t ignore: grow or die.
I’m not about to dispute the value of focusing on growth. It has created tons of progress in certain sectors of our society. But I think it’s worth noting that the kind of growth we have collectively experienced has not treated all parties equally. It might be worth exploring other kinds of growth as well.
People grow in many ways. Children focus on physical growth. The strength and capabilities that come with “growing up” are certainly useful. (Me, I topped out at out at about six feet tall and growing out is… we’ll just say, no longer productive.) Physical growth quickly becomes less important and we move on to emotional and intellectual growth. We grow our capacity for empathy. We grow closer to those around us. We grow wise.
Could business (and even our economy?) aspire to recognize similar limits to physical growth and shift aspirations to another kind of growth?
When we talk about the capital we put together at Community Sourced Capital, we often describe the process of connecting businesses directly to their community as “turning an enterprise’s social capital into financial capital.” The social part looks a lot like trust and strong relationships, and the financial part looks a lot like money. Businesses need financial capital for all sorts of things — including physical growth — and those things change as a business faces new challenges and evolves to fit a dynamic environment. Sometimes, we find businesses looking for growth in terms of product lines or financial maturity. Or, perhaps most exciting, growing in terms of connections to their community. That’s when the social capital part (trust and relationships) comes in.
By sharing a company’s story of growth with its community, and most importantly, by sharing with one’s community an intention for a specific kind of growth, pathways open up for the flow of all kinds of capital: intellectual capital, human capital, social capital. A company that realizes its potential to access all sources of capital will find endless growth.
So, what would you like to grow this year?
Alex Mondau, Director, Community Sourced Capital
Let’s start by asking a question: do businesses need to grow? I’ll cast my vote to say “Yes.” Actually, I will say “Absolutely.” Yet, there are many kinds of growth. We can grow up, we can grow out, and we can also grow wise. So let’s make sure we are talking about the same thing.
The economy we know today is pretty attached to a classic growth paradigm that demands growth, and mostly growth that manifests itself in growing revenue or profit or, in its largest sense, GDP. At the micro level, I witness this paradigm in action every time I hear the question, “How are you going to grow this business?” It’s a call you can’t ignore: grow or die.
I’m not about to dispute the value of focusing on growth. It has created tons of progress in certain sectors of our society. But I think it’s worth noting that the kind of growth we have collectively experienced has not treated all parties equally. It might be worth exploring other kinds of growth as well.
People grow in many ways. Children focus on physical growth. The strength and capabilities that come with “growing up” are certainly useful. (Me, I topped out at out at about six feet tall and growing out is… we’ll just say, no longer productive.) Physical growth quickly becomes less important and we move on to emotional and intellectual growth. We grow our capacity for empathy. We grow closer to those around us. We grow wise.
Could business (and even our economy?) aspire to recognize similar limits to physical growth and shift aspirations to another kind of growth?
When we talk about the capital we put together at Community Sourced Capital, we often describe the process of connecting businesses directly to their community as “turning an enterprise’s social capital into financial capital.” The social part looks a lot like trust and strong relationships, and the financial part looks a lot like money. Businesses need financial capital for all sorts of things — including physical growth — and those things change as a business faces new challenges and evolves to fit a dynamic environment. Sometimes, we find businesses looking for growth in terms of product lines or financial maturity. Or, perhaps most exciting, growing in terms of connections to their community. That’s when the social capital part (trust and relationships) comes in.
By sharing a company’s story of growth with its community, and most importantly, by sharing with one’s community an intention for a specific kind of growth, pathways open up for the flow of all kinds of capital: intellectual capital, human capital, social capital. A company that realizes its potential to access all sources of capital will find endless growth.
So, what would you like to grow this year?
Alex Mondau, Director, Community Sourced Capital
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