Is bigger always better?

Americans (and especially Texans) love boasting that bigger is better. We can see it in our businesses and in our churches. But is it?

A story on NPR today asked some challenging questions about business growth. Charles Handy, the founder of London Business School, asked why business is different than orchestras, schools, or hospitals. Once an orchestra reaches a certain size, if you asked the conductor about growth, he would likely discuss their expanding repertoire, not adding more violins.

I heard an environmental scientist address this issue once, drawing the distinction between growth and development. Biologically, once we have eyes, ears, limbs and organs, we are done growing. The rest is development:

For our own bodies, and our communities, development is getting the right things in the right places in the right amounts at the right times in the right relationships. Just like there is no advantage for our brain to grow out of proportion with our stomach or vice versa, so there is no advantage to adding house to house at the expense of the farms and gardens that sustain our food supply, or at the expense of clean air and water that sustain our health.

Growth freed from the constraints of true development is cancer, as we all know.

For those of us working for public companies, we are complicit in a system that unashamedly pursues growth as a fundamental tenet of delivering shareholder value. But public companies are just the easiest example. I wonder if most business and even most churches aren't pursuing the same "growth imperative" without regard to the consequences.

Cells that get too large either burst or split to form new life. Why doesn't business/church heed wisdom from the basic building block of all life? How can we ensure the growth we are pursuing isn't cancerous?