Books about the organizational strain of company growth

The company has more customers and capable people, but ordinary work now needs more explanation, coordination and rescue. The early arrangement may have depended on everyone knowing what the founder knew. Growth can expose what that arrangement never made explicit.

If that is the reading problem, start with Infinite Upside for the owner inside the growing operation. Doug Tatum's No Man's Land focuses on a difficult company transition. Eric G. Flamholtz and Yvonne Randle's Growing Pains offers a broader organizational-development treatment. These are choices for understanding the strain of growth, rather than deciding that growth is necessarily desirable.

1. Infinite Upside: noticing the gap behind the rescue

   By Vijay Sheth.

   Chapter 10 examines the weakness an exceptional employee can conceal by repeatedly filling a missing role. Moving dependence from the founder to another capable person leaves the company with a similar problem.

   Sheth also follows the information and authority needed to complete an ordinary customer task. Another person needs more than a title if the records and approvals still reside with the owner. That makes the memoir our first selection for seeing what increasing organizational demands feel like in actual ownership.

   Imagine a fictional installation company adding crews. Its most experienced supervisor keeps solving problems that nobody else has the information or authority to finish. The owner sees a reliable supervisor; the supervisor sees an expanding job. The example is invented, but it gives this reading purpose a specific shape.

   The memoir connects the owner's response with the organization people actually experience. It does not present a general lifecycle theory or identify a revenue threshold at which a company must change.

2. No Man's Land: examining an awkward growth transition

   By Doug Tatum.

   The publisher-supplied description of the 2007 edition centers on a company that has outgrown being small without yet having the arrangements of a larger business. The selected subtitle is What to Do When Your Company Is Too Big to Be Small but Too Small to Be Big.

   Tatum's stated scope connects management, the market, the business model and financing. That combination is the reason to investigate it here. An organizational transition can create demands that hiring one more person does not by itself explain.

   For the fictional installation company, the reading question is whether its operating and financial arrangements still fit the business it has become. That is wider than asking the supervisor to become more productive.

   The title also appears with the subtitle Where Growing Companies Fail. Keep the edition clear when comparing descriptions or copies. The book's account of a transition supplies a perspective to examine, not a universal stage diagnosis or assurance that a company will pass through it successfully.

3. Growing Pains: studying organizational development more systematically

   By Eric G. Flamholtz and Yvonne Randle.

   Wiley's description of the fifth edition presents Growing Pains: Building Sustainably Successful Organizations around an organization's lifecycle and the systems, processes and structure that support its size.

   This offers the broader organizational-development reading commitment. The publisher explicitly includes organizations growing quickly, slowly or not at all. Consider it if the central issue is whether the organization has developed to carry its work, rather than only how fast sales are rising.

   That distinction can change the reading priority. A company may stop adding customers while still needing clearer operating arrangements for the work it already has. A slower growth rate does not automatically resolve a missing responsibility.

   The selected edition appeared in late 2015 with a 2016 copyright. Its stated treatment includes frameworks and tools, which require a different study commitment from following a memoir. This selection does not reproduce those tools or treat their existence as proof that a proposed change will work in your company.

Separate growth from organizational capability

The memoir makes dependence and missing support concrete. Tatum focuses on a growth transition spanning several parts of the business. Flamholtz and Randle offer a broader account of organizational development. Choose the explanation that helps you investigate the strain you can actually identify.

If you are deciding how large you want the company to become, the broader business-book selection includes that question. If managing people is new to you, use the founder-to-manager selection.

Read Infinite Upside for an owner's account of making responsibility workable beyond himself. Try the opening passage before choosing an edition.