escape velocity

It’s ‘obvious’ for companies to be established with a set of growth goals. You plan for X growth in ‘Year 1′ and 2X growth in ‘Year 2′ and so on. Local establishments aim to be regionally known, regional ones aim to go national, and national aim to go global. In a way, aspiring to grow is the only way (that most of us know) to stay in business. In some ways, it’s like running downhill, you’ve got to accelarate just to stay in balance.

Then again, there are some companies that do not have growth plans, or let’s say their strategy is to stay small and profitable. Not everyone manages to sustain themselves in such a state. Retail shops do. But not many companies are able to. Or, maybe some are. Some technology companies survive being small, and stay so by taking few projects, and also working on a niche area.

Micro breweries are another example. I just found this through the blog of 37Signals, whose folk seem to take up every opportunity to justify how to stay small and happy. I guess they believe their company has similar principles.

The posting refers to an article on Chow.com, where the interviewer asks Vinnie Cilurzo, a Microbrewer on the importance of their local company going national, to which he answers…

Not at all……I get calls from distributors all the time from all over the country. But we do this more for the lifestyle…..I can ride my bike to work. …..I think you can get caught up way too much in growth. We don’t have any growth goals.

I guess it’s good to be clear about whether one is in business to grow or to live a lifestyle

Blogs come in many avatars.  And, for someone following people’s writings through blogs, sifting through the various types of content can be quite exhausting.  But, thanks to new social utilities like Twitter and Facebook, I guess we are witnessing a culling in the blogsphere. I guess this is a good trend too. This way, Blogs would remain as focused and ‘information rich’ mediums, while other forms of information sharing moves to newer niche services.

People wanting to update what they are up to are switching to Twitter, and people who are trying to keep in contact with their acquaintances, share photos, talk about life etc, are doing so using Facebook.

Furthermore, the new Facebook has crossed over in to the Twitter space, with it’s ‘what are you doing now?’ feature, where people are litterally ‘twittering’ within a closed group of acquaintances. And to top it all, since services like Facebook only allow access to ‘friends’ we see more personal and detailed updates being shared with each other.

All in all, it’s nice to be witnessing a natural process of sorting of information dissemination happening on the Web, and I guess this is good.