Customer Reviews

Growing Pains : Transitioning from an Entrepreneurship to a Professionally Managed Firm

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After 2 successful startups and serving as an executive in three Fortune 500 enterprises, I was doubtful there would be much to learn here. I was surprised to find the book to be rich in insights for both the budding CEO and the experienced enterprise corporate officer. Especially valuable are the maps of where effort needs to be concentrated at various stages of growth and the discussion on the benefits and consequences of different leadership styles. I use the book now to train new corporate leaders.

If you have ever been in a start-up enterprise, where the founding member(s) are the driving force of the entrepreneurship, you will find yourself nodding your head up and down, by the time you get to page 10. This is reality! If the quest of the entrepreneurship is to build a lasting company, one that will have a legacy beyond its founder(s), you need this book. Look at GROWING PAINS as a roadmap, not a dictionary. This IS NOT a book to put in the library and rarely look at; rather it IS a book to keep open on your desk, to have dog-eared pages, highlights, and bookmarks, in dozens and dozens of places. For anyone who desires to move the start-up entrepreneurship into the Fortune 500 and beyond, this book IS a must-have.

This is a book about an important topic - the transitions compnies must go through, from the struggle for surival to becoming a large, mature company. It contains a very useful and credible model in the form of a pyramid depicting the 'normal' growth stages of a company, beginning with defining product/market and ending with establishing a corporate culture. Two noticeable shortcomings: the authors seem to largely ignore strategy and business models in their description of the growth path, and second, it is written in a very lieless and textbookish style. The management jargon rolls on and on, dulling the reader's mind, and making him wonder if he is reading the same page again and again. The entire approach is extremely conventional, with very little appreciation for more modern theories of management. Overall, a good book, not great.

Many entrepreneurs are unprepared for the rigorous organisational demands of rapid growth. As firms mature, the loose, informal management styles that drove them to success become inadequate. Original systems are strained, profits decline, and founders are ousted to make room for more experienced managers.

Drawing on the case studies of recent success stories, the authors show entrepreneurs how to make the successful transition from humble start-up to professionally managed firm without sacrificing the unique spirit that inspired the company in the first place. They provide readers with a framework they can use to evaluate their firm's growth objectively, anticipate problems, pinpoint solutions, and plan strategies that will move their company towards desired goals. They outline the seven predictable stages of organisational growth and identify what must be accomplished in each stage to ensure the company's continued healthy development.

Growing Pains provides the entrepreneur with many proven principles of professional management, offering guidance in such key areas as strategic planning, organisational structure, management development, organisational control, leadership, and corporate culture management. Thoroughly updated to address the realities of today's business environment, this book will help company founders deal with the personal and professional challenges they must confront as they transform their companies into professionally managed firms.

Eric G. Flamholtz is professor of management at UCLA's Anderson Graduate School of Management and president of Management Systems Consulting Corporation, which he cofounded in 1978. The author of more than one hundred articles and chapters on a variety of management topics, Flamholtz has also published four books. Yvonne Randle is lecturer at UCLA's Anderson Graduate School of Management's entrepreneurial studies program and vice president of Management Systems Consulting Corporation where she has been a consultant since 1983. She is the author of two books and numerous articles on increasing organisational effectiveness.

See also my review of: MAKING THE CISCO CONNECTION: The Story Behind the Real Internet Superpower David Bunnell with Adam Brate John Wiley & Sons, 2000 ISBN 0-471-35711-1

Flamholtz (the author) does and excellent job of describing the various stages of organizational growth. In each stage he describes what an organization must be doing in order to grow into the next level. The book provides plenty of real-world examples that Flamholtz has himself been a part of. Flamholtz also does a great job of interjecting his business street smarts. The guy understands how to grow a business and he does an even better job of laying it out for the reader in this book through frameworks and human resource concepts.

This book is a must read for anyone in business. For the entrepreneur, it can be used as a guide. For the more experienced business person, it can be used as a dose of reality. Having just completed my MBA and writing my thesis on this very topic, I only wish I had read this book 6 months earlier.

The authors provide an excellent framework for growing a business along with relevant case studies. And while it may look like a typical text book, it is less theory than most. This is one to be kept for years to come!

One of the most engaging books I have read in quite a while, primarily because it addresses the common pains companies, like ours, experience with growth. The content of this book is extremely practical to our current stage of growth and adequately addresses nearly aspect of growth. The focus is on systems & frameworks and the changing roles and mindset of the leadership team.

After having spent three years working at a pretty disorganized dot.com, I wanted to learn more about the right and wrong ways that young firms grow up. This book presents a fair framework that charts a company's growth, though it assumes that the troubles start when too many orders pour in and sales do not result in profits. (Not the case at a dot.com)

Firms are classified into four stages of development, and the text describes the good and bad of each. Some methodologies are presented for "scoring" the company for an offhand appraisal of its strengths and situation. (Kind of like the CMM scale, I guess)

But the worst part about the book was how tedious it was to read. The author spends hundreds of pages explaining just a few core concepts. The text describes, on and on, what the author is going to say next, then says it, and then reminds you about it for page after page. Just get to the point!

This is a great book for anyone in business. It offers tools such as the Growing Pains Questionnaire that you can use in your organization to gather valuable information to work from.