Why growth is bad (for your company) | Ben Johnson | Buddha On The Board
Every business owner wants to grow, right? In this video, I explain why we need to rethink our views on growth and why chasing growth for growth’s sake can harm your company. This is one of my series of videos pondering the question, “what if The Buddha was on your company board?” and what kind of company it would look like should that be the case.
CHAPTERS:
00:00 What if The Buddha was on your Board?
00:16 Why perpetual growth is not necessary (according to nature)
01:25 Why we need to look to winter to learn the lessons of growth
02:03 Why focusing on perpetual growth is an impossible task
02:16 Why a little bit of death can be a good thing
02:57 What to focus on instead of perpetual growth
03:36 Why it’s good for business to spend more time in nature Here’s what to do next:
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TRANSCRIPT:
Greetings friends. Ben here,pondering again this question and this idea: if the Buddha was on your company board, how much more effective would it be? How much of a better place to work? How much more useful, to be perfectly honest, would your company be?
Now I'm back here again in my garden where I was with some earlier videos, not to talk about the benefit of being outside. You know about the benefit of being outside. But really it's an opportunity to talk about one of the most important learnings about running a business. Everything in our culture points to the idea that perpetual growth is good. Perpetual growth is necessary. This, as an idea, is stitched so deep into the fabric of everything that we do. We sort of believe that it is necessary. We sort of believe if we're successful, that's what's happening. And if we're failing, that's not the opposite of that happening. But the idea of perpetual growth is completely ridiculous, a fallacy and hugely destructive. As we know for a whole range of reasons, the idea that we keep needing to produce new things so that we can grow, that's not helping anything. So rather than talking specifically about that, I'm just kind of interested again about my garden or not specifically my garden, but what's happening out there.
The idea of perpetual growth doesn't happen anywhere in nature. There's nothing in nature that grows forever. We had the helpful guys in the other day, getting the garden ready for winter. They're cutting things back. They're pruning things down. They're getting rid of leaves. They're getting rid of branches. They're helping the garden retreat. They're helping the garden die a little bit so that it can go into the kind of restful period of winter where it can focus all of its energies in the right place, under the soil, unseen, unheard, channeling all of its kind of energy there. So, it's ready to kind of burst into life again, come spring.
And I think this is another important lesson The Buddha would have us focus on if he were on our company board. This idea of growth forever, of course, is impossible and it doesn't happen anywhere else in nature.
So maybe he'd asked us to look at what does happen in nature and start modeling our work and our companies on that. The idea that a little bit of death is a good thing because death precedes life, it precedes growth. The garden doesn't bounce back to life in spring, just on a kind of perpetual upward curve. The garden, as I said, bounces back to life after the fallow period, after the quiet time, after the sleep of winter, where it conserves its energy where the death of autumn into the quiet of winter, precedes the life in spring. And I think this is a much better model for us to think about for our work, for our companies.
Put away the idea of perpetual growth year on year growth, and instead embrace the idea that everything has a time to die, but that time to die is kind of preceding it's kind of sparking new life. So worry less about perpetual growth and start focusing more on the kind of rise and fall that we see elsewhere that we see everywhere else in nature. It's an easier, truer, more realistic thing to aim for and has the kind of benefit really of getting us off that hamster wheel of chasing the impossible idea of never-ending growth.
So I guess my kind of final wish or final idea is: get out there, spend time in nature, let nature be the teacher because we can learn loads more about running our businesses and doing good work than we can immersing ourselves in textbooks and management ideas that are essentially talking a load of rubbish. Until next time, Ben.