Organizational Growth Quotes

At around 50 employees, you get to the point where you can't see what's going on all the time. So you start to have weekly check-ins, and you have days that go by without knowing exactly what's going on.

There is almost nothing more painful for a leader than seeing good people leave a growing organization, whether it's a priest watching a Sunday school teacher walk out the door or a CEO saying goodbye to a co-founder.

I'm fascinated by management and organizations: how organizations get things done and how successful organizations are built and maintained, how they evolve as they grow from start-ups to small companies to medium companies to big companies.

Leaders are people who ‘walk ahead,’ people genuinely committed to deep changes, in themselves and in their organizations.

The thing I'm most proud of in my career was to be able to help two organizations go someplace that they've never been before. Not many people get that opportunity to do it with one.

Every movement, to stay alive - a very difficult thing to do historically - has to find a way to harness that initial surge of emotion and turn it to the hard, steady, un-sexy work of recruiting new members, strategizing, negotiating with those in power, keeping itself going.

To be the organization that we want to be, we have to have a place to play.

The chances of catastrophe grow as organizations grow in number and size, and as internal communications become more time consuming and less intelligible.

Many leaders are tempted to lead like a chess master, striving to control every move, when they should be leading like gardeners, creating and maintaining a viable ecosystem in which the organization operates.

I want everyone inside of Microsoft to take that responsibility. This is not about top-line growth. This is not about bottom-line growth. This is about us individually having a growth mindset.

Civilization is a progress from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity toward a definite, coherent heterogeneity.

People and organizations don't grow much without delegation and completed staff work because they are confined to the capacities of the boss and reflect both personal strengths and weaknesses.

The responsibility of the company is to help the people, grow as people. If we can do that, then the company will grow as a company.

Growth is the process of responding positively to change.

An idea that can change the course of the company can come from anywhere.

That's a problem. I mean, like any sort of growing startup organization, we are sort of overwhelmed by our growth. And that means we're getting enormous quantity of whistleblower disclosures of a very high caliber, but don't have enough people to actually process and vet this information.

If you want to make changes in the world, you're going to have to be there day after day doing the boring, straightforward work of getting a couple of people interested and building a slightly bigger organization and carrying out the next move and suffering frustration and finally getting somewhere. That's how the world changes.

Leaders learn to leverage the problems that never go away in a way to create progress for the organization.

The single biggest way to impact an organization is to focus on leadership development. There is almost no limit to the potential of an organization that recruits good people, raises them up as leaders and continually develops them.

You don't build a business --you build people-- and then people build the business.

You want to think about what is the path for my first 10 or 15 employees going to be as the company grows.

Once you go from 10 people to 100, you already don't know who everyone is. So at that stage you might as well keep growing, to get the advantages of scale.

I do not know how history will judge me, but let me say that I've spent a lot of time and energy trying to transform the Tatas from a patriarchal concern to an institutional enterprise. It would, therefore, be a mark of failure on my part if it were perceived that Ratan Tata epitomises the Group's success. What I have done is establish growth mechanisms, play down individuals and play up the team that has made the companies what they are. I, for one, am not the kind who loves dwelling on the 'I'. If history remembers me at all, I hope it will be for this transformation.

Any time there is change, there is opportunity. So it is paramount that an organization get energized rather than paralyzed.

Leaders with empathy do more than sympathize with people around them: they use their knowledge to improve their companies in subtle, but important ways.