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Is your company in overdrive? Avoiding these seven management problems will help you keep control of the wheel.
Far better to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in the grey twilight that knows not victory, nor defeat.
-Theodore Roosevelt, 1899
In some respects, Theodore Rossevelt would probably have made a good chief executive of a fast-growth company. He certainly wou;d have had the imagination to "dare mighty things," such as coming up with plans to double the size of his firm in three years. And he probably would have enjoyed rallying his staff to the "glourious triumphs" of meeting such ambitious goals. But even he would have been pressed to deal with the enormous day-to-day management challenges facing rapidly growing companies (defined for the purposes of this article as companies whose sales grow by at least on-third a year).
The challenges of success are far more complex than those faced by failing businesses, which tend to follow a simple "cause-and-effect" form. Something has gone wrong and the faltering company tries to put it right. Rapid growth, by contrast, presents the heretofore successful management team with a multidimensional set of problems-all of which must be dealt with thoroughly if the company's performance is not to suddenly spiral out of control.
Hypergrowth for those companies lucky enough to enjoy it tends to be a mere phase of corporate life. Most high-growth companies are of the midsize variety: big enough to flex their muscles in their market, yet small enough to retain the entrepreneurial spirit of their early days. The fast phase of growth will rarely go on indefinitely, with today's consistent high-growth achievers usually turning into tomorrow's lumbering corporate giants. The current crop of hypergrowth companies does, however, have one large advantage over its predecessors. The growth of technology and the Internet, in particular, has allowed them the luxury of an international presence without the buildup of extra layers of management.
Management Review has found that while most of the management challenges facing hypergrowth companies relate to a rapidly changing corporate structure, the managers also must deal with issues concerning employees, customers...