Prosperity Without Growth at All Costs
Many founders have rejected growth at all costs. The harder question is what to aim at instead, if not just slower growth.
There is a default answer to what a company is for: grow. Grow revenue, grow users, grow headcount, and if the company is venture-backed, grow fast enough to return the fund.
A growing number of founders have said no to this. Zebra founders build companies that are profitable and purposeful, meant to last rather than to win at any cost. B Corps commit to weighing their workers, community and environment alongside their shareholders. Many purpose-driven founders simply refuse to sell what people don’t need.
But saying no to growth at all costs leaves a harder question open. What do you aim at instead? “Sustainable growth” is often the answer, and it is often the same target at a gentler speed. The company still needs next year to be bigger than this one. It has only agreed to get there more politely.
This essay suggests a target that is not a speed.
“Know your enough” is easy to say for a company that is already profitable. For a young company fighting to survive, growth may be the only way to reach enough at all. We agree. The point is not to stop before enough. It is to know where enough is, so that growth has an end, and the company knows when it has arrived.
The compulsion, named
Madhyasth Darshan, our primary source, is precise about what drives growth at all costs. It defines profit as giving less and taking more. That is a moral definition, not the accountant’s: a margin earned by making something useful and pricing it fairly is not “giving less and taking more” in this sense. And it gives the drive a name of its own: लाभोन्माद, a compulsion towards profit, together with the belief that exploitation is what makes a business succeed.
That second half matters for founders. The compulsion is not only a wish for more. It is a belief about how success works: that someone has to get less for the business to get more. Most founders who reject growth at all costs are rejecting exactly that belief. The source gives them words for it.
What earning is for
The source does not say that money is the problem. It says something more useful: the purpose of earning is to use it well, and waste is the real loss. A person who earns justly and spends well is successful and happy; otherwise, not.
On the same page are two lines any founder could put on a wall. Income gained through exploitation does not make anyone happy, from one person to many. And out of confusion, people have hoped to become happy through profit.
The book also has a phrase for the highest gain: परम लाभ, the ultimate profit, which it defines as proof of humaneness. The word “profit” is kept, and pointed at something else.
“A company can grow in volume while declining in value.”
Growth or development
Here is the distinction that changes the target. The source defines development as a change from lesser value to greater value, and decline as the reverse.
That is not a definition of size. A company can develop without growing in volume: its products more useful and better made, its people more settled, its relationships more trusted, less taken from nature for the same good done. And a company can grow in volume while declining in value.
Growth at all costs measures volume. A company aiming at development would measure value, and would treat volume as one way of getting there, not the point.
A company’s enough
The source defines prosperity as producing more than is needed and consuming less, and describes the goal as more-than-enough production in every family.
Applied to a company, this suggests three things a founder can actually decide:
- Every family in the company has enough. Before the company grows, do the people who make it have more than they need? If not, that is the first use of surplus.
- The company knows its own enough. At what size, revenue and margin does more stop serving the people the company is for? Most companies never write this down. Writing it down changes what a good year means.
- The surplus has a direction, decided in advance. Once enough is reached, where does the rest go: into better products, lower prices, the people, the community, what returns to nature? Our essay How should a business measure success? sets out five measures for exactly this.
Practices for founders
Some practices that follow, offered as hypotheses to test:
- Write your enough down, and share it with your team and investors. If no one knows where enough is, everyone will assume it is “more”.
- Report development, not only growth. Alongside revenue, track usefulness, quality, trust and what you take from nature per unit of good done.
- Choose capital whose expectations match. Investors who need an exit on a timetable will need growth on a timetable. Some forms of capital are built for companies that intend to stay.
- Price fairly. Prices built on scarcity reward taking more for less. Our essay How should things be priced? sets out an alternative based on labour and usefulness.
- Treat profit as a sign, not the purpose. A healthy margin shows the business is sustainable. It does not show the business is good.
A protocol to try
Write down your company’s enough: the size, revenue and margin at which more would stop serving the people the company is for. Then ask a co-founder or investor to write theirs without seeing yours, and compare. If the numbers are far apart, or one of you wrote “more”, you have found the conversation to have first.
How we would know if we are wrong
This fails if:
- companies that set and publish their enough turn out less durable than companies that don’t, because a competitor without a limit takes their market;
- “development” cannot be measured without collapsing back into revenue;
- people in the company want more than enough, and a founder who stops at enough loses them.
The first is the strongest objection, and we take it seriously. Markets do reward volume. Our answer is not that the objection is wrong, but that a business built on trust and usefulness competes on different ground, and that the cost of growth at all costs is paid by someone, usually not in the accounts.
An invitation
If you are building a zebra, a B Corp or any company that wants to be good rather than only big, we would like to work through this with you: what your enough is, what development means for your company, and how to measure it. See also Enough as a climate strategy and Happiness that lasts at work. Work with us →
Limitations
- The source writes about families, society and exchange, not about companies or capital markets. Applying it to company strategy is our interpretation.
- We have not studied whether companies that set an explicit enough last longer or do more good. That is a hypothesis.
- This essay says little about competition and market structure, which shape what any single company can choose.
References
- Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, लाभ (profit) and लाभोन्माद (compulsion for profit), p. 163
- Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, परम लाभ (the ultimate profit), p. 106
- Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, समृद्धि (prosperity), p. 191; उत्पादन सुलभता (more-than-enough production in every family), p. 46
- Manav Vyavahar Darshan (मानव व्यवहार दर्शन), p. 95: the purpose of earning is good use; income through exploitation makes no one happy; people have hoped to be happy through profit
- Manav Vyavahar Darshan (मानव व्यवहार दर्शन), p. 174: development as change from lesser to greater value
