Growth or Quality: Do We Have a Choice?

Not if you still want to be in business in 10 years

Company X was a new entrant in its industry. There were quite a few established players that X had to compete against. The current top three companies had each taken between seven and 10 years to reach their current size and position. X’s ambition was to become the industry leader in size during its first three years of existence.

X had the capital available to make this happen, and soon it was on a fast-paced growth path. Within three years, the number of cities in which the company established its business grew tenfold.

During the same period, the number of employees at X grew more than 30 times the original core group. Almost all of these employees were salespeople. They were given formidable sales targets and big incentives if they met these targets. With extensive (and expensive) ad campaigns and aggressive if not necessarily profitable, pricing to back them, many of the salespeople did initially succeed in reaching the target sales goals.

With customers being added in the thousands nearly every day, the company was on a roll. Or was it?

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Comments

Very unlikely to happen

In these times where business knowledge and quality concepts are so easily available, it is very unlikely that any company (X, Y or Z), doesn't focus on customers, the ultimate target of their products.

Yes, it is possible, that their processes are not strong enough and products not robust enough to meet customer's expectations. Which can be due to in sufficient effort in this area, but not "No effort"

A Fairy tale?

I don't think so: I would rather espouse Arun's than Jawad's odalisque, based on my knowledge of the many italian Companies that all too often and all too quickly collapse due to their greed for quick budget. Quality is just an optional to them, and one of the least important - quality of people is probably the least important of all: top managers only care for their "big black cars", and when one doesn't agree with them, he's fired, just the same as the Conscience whispering from the right shoulder is crushed as if it were a fly. Thank you, Mr. Manager.