Grow or Die?

Blair recognizes growth opportunities in every area of life and business, yet sees many people chasing metrics while unknowingly resisting genuine progress for various reasons.

Links

"Chief Growth Officer" by Blair Enns for winwithoutpitching.com

Transcript

David C. Baker: All right, so I am going to start this episode off by reading, I think there's like nine words in here, something you wrote that sounds very philosophical. You said, "The drive for growth is perhaps the most fundamental force in the universe."

Blair Enns: You went right to the most provocative statement. Good for you. Let's start with the good stuff.

David: I'm trying to picture, where were you when you wrote that? Were you on a beach? Had you just climbed the top of a thing? Had you just written something?

Blair: I was coming down after five grams of mushrooms.

[laughter]

Blair: That's about right past the peak. That's about when that thought would come to me. [chuckles] For the record, I have never done five grams of mushrooms.

David: Yes. The drive for growth is perhaps the most fundamental force in the universe. That's a pretty darn big statement. I got to say, when I first read that, you sent me this article that you wanted to talk about a couple weeks ago. I thought, oh, there's some bullshit hidden in here.

Blair: It's not hidden very well.

[laughter]

Blair: Yes. It's a little too obvious. I knew that would trigger you as a former divinity student.

David: Oh, actually, that's not what occurred to me. No, what really struck me is this. We'll get into that later. I want this to be about your thoughts. Instead of asking what prompted you to think about this, I want to ask a different question. When you let this realization flood your soul, what doors did it open? How did you start thinking differently about things? Oh, I got you with a good question, didn't I?

Blair: It's a great question. The subject of growth, I don't know if you've noticed it, but I keep coming back to it every couple of years. We're referencing a post that I wrote called Chief Growth Officer. It's a longer one. It might be approaching 2,000 words. It was a wonderful experience for me to write this as I explore this topic because I keep coming back to it over and over again. One of the stories I've told multiple times on podcast episodes and I've written about it is my first economics class.

I remember the professor making this statement and then he just breezed past it, which was that growth was a requirement for the economy. At the age of 18, I thought that's impossible. For years, I grappled with it. We've touched on this peripherally on a few different episodes where I would be at a different place and grappling with it. Now, I am fascinated by AI and all the prophecies of AI. I see all these tech people saying that AI is going to be smarter than humans. I think that's probably impossible for AI to be smarter than humans. I think it's likely we won't get to artificial superintelligence that surpasses humans.

David: You don't know some of the humans I do.

[laughter]

Blair: You live in Tennessee.

[laughter]

David: That's right.

Blair: Oh, there go all my Tennessee clients. It used to be AGI. AGI was the thing that would be the general intelligence that would surpass humans. Now, we've got some other wonky definition of AGI and we've replaced AGI with ASI, artificial superintelligence. Whatever letters you want to use, we're talking about the intelligence that will basically make humans redundant. Then we're going to be left with these issues of, well, if robots and AI are doing all the work, what's left? I just don't think we'll ever get there.

I'll call all of that stuff AGI. I think to solve AGI, we're going to have to solve the consciousness problem, the hard problem of consciousness. What is it? From where does it arise? We're going to have to have a theory of consciousness. I think for us to have a theory of consciousness, we're going to have to reconcile the two branches of physics, of quantum physics and classical physics.

I think consciousness is part of the problem, part of the reason those two branches aren't resolved. I think the dogma of scientists, the religion of scientists does not allow them to get to a solution at which consciousness is at the core. Are you still with me?

David: I'm still with you, yes, tentatively.

Blair: Where did I get this idea that growth might be even more fundamental than physics? The first place I got it was David Deutsch. He wrote a book called The Fabric of Reality in 1997. He's a Cambridge or Oxford physicist, mathematician, philosopher. He's the heir to Karl Popper in the area of epistemology. What he does say is there are basically four strands of reality. One of them is evolution and one of them is epistemology. These are the two different ways that anywhere in the universe we create knowledge; through the evolution of genes and through effectively the evolution of ideas, and they happen the same way through these two tools of conjecture and criticism. You still with me?

David: Yes. You write about conjecture and criticism, those two balancing opposing forces in the article.

Blair: It is fundamental to biology genes evolve, species evolve through this conjecture and criticism. His point, and maybe it was Popper's point originally, but he put them together and said effectively they're the same thing. I think Richard Dawkins did a little bit of that too because he coined the term meme. He said basically a meme is to ideas what a gene is to an organism. If ideas and organisms evolve through conjecture and criticism, maybe that's not fundamental at the level of physics, it's fundamental at the level of biology and things that arrive out of biology. If you think of ideas as things that arrive out of biology. You with me so far?

David: Yes, yes.

Blair: There's another really good Theory of Everything called My Big Toe, ToE stands for Theory of Everything, by a guy named Thomas Campbell, who's a former NASA physicist. I'm about three quarters of the way through his 800-page trilogy, My Big Toe. It is the most detailed, purely scientific explanation of a Theory of Everything, and it has consciousness at the heart of it.

In his model, and he's not the only one to have a really good Theory of Everything that has consciousness as basically the substrate of the universe. Scientists would say consciousness, we have physics, on top of that we have chemistry, on top of that we have biology, on top of that we have, let's call it sociology, even ideas would be in there. Then somehow with enough intelligence, consciousness arises.

Now, anybody who's spent any time thinking about this knows this can't possibly be true.

David: [chuckles] You just wiped out everything you just said.

[laughter]

Blair: It's not true. As Thomas Campbell and a few others, Federico Faggin, who's another famous physicist who has a lot of political capital in the world, in his domain, I think he invented the first, not the transistor, but the Intel 4004, and the touchpad and other things like this. He's got a somewhat related universal Theory of Everything, but the really interesting theories of everything today have consciousness as base reality and physics as something that comes out of it.

Robert Lanza, who wrote a series of books and his theory is called biocentrism. He's a stem cell researcher, similar. You are right in that declaration, and I hedge my bet a bit because it's not absolutely true, but I think it's likely, in that declaration, growth is mandatory for everyone and almost everything, and that the drive for growth is perhaps the most fundamental force in the universe, that does fall out of a collection of different theories of everything, which are just theories, that put consciousness as the substrate of the universe.

David: Back to how this article hit people, because you told me earlier that this article prompted more feedback from people than you've received normally. I'm just wondering why. Did they agree with it or did they disagree with it? What was it that resonated when you said the drive for growth is perhaps the most fundamental force in the universe? How did they even apply that to their own setting, running marketing creative firms? There's other readers, too, but that's the bulk of them. How did they read this and why did it strike them?

Blair: The reason why this spoke to people so much is I think most people are conflicted by the subject of growth, as I was for many years. I wrote in The Post, I spent 40 years grappling with this issue of growth can't be a constant because we live in a resource-constrained world and universe. That's one reason it's wrong. It just seems wrong to always be striving, to always be taking.

I define growth as a little bit differently for people. I went back to this, what it is that I think consciousness is doing, what are genes doing, what are species and ecosystems doing, what are ideas doing. They're basically trying to expand. They're trying to improve themselves and find the most profitable version of themselves and then double down on that and keep striving forward.

When I explained what real growth is and I said, don't confuse the map for the territory, these things that we use to measure growth in business, headcount, revenue, profit, they can be pretty good rough surrogates for growth, but they're not growth itself. Growth is essentially learning and expanding. Your consciousness wants to do that. Your biology wants to do that. Your ideas want to do that. The systems that are expressions of you or built on you, such as your business, it wants to do that too. Growth is a fundamental driving force of the planet, of biology, I maintain of, I wouldn't say physics, but of life that arises out of physics. I think it's fundamental. If you take it all the way to what I think is probably the root substrate of the universe, which is consciousness itself, consciousness wants to grow.

David: You define growth elsewhere in the article as self-exploration and self-advancement achieved through the twin actions of conjecture and criticism. Essentially trying something and then testing it. I like to say that leadership, it's not entirely this, but it involves making lots of decisions. Your job as a leader isn't to make all the correct decisions, it's to make lots of decisions. The more decisions you make, the more the criticism of that conjecture is a small price to pay. You don't lose a lot if you make a bad decision if you're making lots of little decisions. Is this different from simply a drive for meaning?

Growth as you defined it, self-exploration and self-advancement. I imagine a principal of a creative firm is listening to this and they want to grow because it signifies something, grow in terms of headcount. That's not central for them, but it matters a little bit. They definitely want to make more money every year. They want to do better work for clients. Are all of those expressions of this drive for growth, in other words, they are growing if those things are happening and they're not dying, or are you wanting to define growth differently than that?

Blair: I want to separate the map from the territory. Again, I think it's not like maps are useless.

David: Maps are pretty good approximate guides.

Blair: I forget who, somebody quite famous many, many years ago said all maps are liars, which I think is a great line because of this mistaking the map for the territory. I want to separate those two things. I want to point out that it was me speaking directly to the many people I've encountered and many more that I haven't who say things like, okay, I think I have enough. They usually don't say I have enough. They usually say that other person has enough. I don't see why they keep going. When you read this, did you think at all about the firms that you've encountered that maybe put aside growth goals, however you choose to measure growth goals, and try to focus on doing something good because they have a sense of guilt around what it is that their business is doing? You know the type of owner I'm talking about?

David: Yes, I do. That came to mind in a negative way. In a positive way, what came to mind is a firm that's maybe seven people and is going to be seven or eight people for a long time. They're not making tons of money, but they're very satisfied because there's this intellectual curiosity. They keep inventing models and thinking, and they love going to work because it's an endless challenge. Then, of course, I'm thinking of other people where intellectually they're not on the cutting edge, but they make a lot of money. I look at them and I think, wow, that's really impressive. I don't know how you did that. You're just very disciplined. I could see so many opportunities for growth to be misunderstood, but also many different ways how growth could be interpreted in unique ways and sort of fulfill this promise too.

Blair: If you think of growing as striving and you just accept that everything, everybody, every idea is searching for the next best version of itself, I think that's, whether it's more fundamental than physics or not. Okay, I'm being provocative. You can decide to dismiss that, but I ask you not to throw out the whole argument. I think we would all resonate with this, what I would suggest is one of the few truths in the world that everything is striving. As soon as you quit striving, you're going to be out-competed. You're going to be not just out-competed as in, like, lose a race. You're going to quit being relevant.

In a world where everything and everyone is striving for the next best version of itself while pursuing its objective to basically know itself, to advance itself, to become better, in a world where that is happening all around you, if you choose not to grow, you will be passed by. You will become miserable. You will become compost for everything else around you that is growing.

David: In an earlier episode, I don't remember what the topic of the episode was, but somehow it came up that you, in particular, could remember talking with certain principals that had decided to mail it in at that point. They often would let somebody else run the firm, and they're just collecting money and so on. It doesn't always have to be that. You said you could tell by talking to somebody when they had quit learning, in a way. I remember that stuck with me. That was even years ago. Do you remember that conversation?

Blair: Yes, one eye on the exit. As soon as somebody can tell you the date or the year when they're going to retire, they say, I've got three more years left, they're done. They might be chasing the metrics of growth to get the multiple up, but they are done. That individual is no longer growing.

David: Yes. They're stretching the rubber band, and eventually when they let go, it's going to pop back. I wonder if this article is somewhat of a countercultural article because you've touched on it in several places today in this conversation without coming right out and saying it. There's this sense that, okay, the world shouldn't have billionaires. That would be one way that you would hear this. One constraint I see people talking about a lot now around AI training is, okay, are we going to really have the electrical generation capacity to do this? Somehow that should stop us in our path, and we should not explore this very unique technology because of constrained electrical grid resources.

Then if you just flip this around a little bit, what if the world of micronuclear reactors got mature quickly, and electrical generation was not a constraint. It feels like those same people would need to find the next reason why we need to question growth in a way. I don't know if that's making sense to you, but there's something in the human spirit that you're either for it or you're against it. If you're against it, you're going to find a reason to be against it.

Blair: Yes. I agree with you completely. It's interesting. The energy is the massive constraint on AI. What's happening right now, the plans for energy production in America are going through the roof. They're catching up to where they need to be. I think a lot of people look at the same situation and they lament the amount of energy it's going to take. We've touched on this, and you almost did a topic on it, like abundance versus scarcity mindset. If you have a scarcity mindset, then you think growth is bad.

I give just one example in The Post of why we're not limited by resources when it comes to growth. It's the Joe Pine example he gives in The Experience Economy. I link to a video of him talking about it. He talks about when he was a kid and his mom made a birthday cake, she would go buy the ingredients, and they cost $0.20 or $0.30. Then she'd make a cake. Then time goes by. She buys a packaged cake or a prepackaged cake mix for $2 to $3. The price goes up by an order of magnitude.

More time goes by. For his kids, he buys a birthday cake, $20 to $30. More time goes by. It now becomes a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheesy's for $200 or $300, and the cake is free. More time goes by, and there are people spending $2,000 to $3,000 and more on their kids' birthday experiences. If you look at the amount of natural resources that go into that cake, it barely changes. Yet, what's that? Four orders of magnitude greater in value creation?

There are times in history when we're in spurts of growth and we're leaning somewhat heavily on natural resources. Now might be a little bit of that time, but the people with the scarcity mindset, they ignore things like the substitutability effect, or it's just called substitutability. It's like, I have an electric car. I have my reasons for buying an electric car. Some people are anti-electric car, and they point out, oh, there's a shortage of lithium in the planet. I say, well, go to Google Earth and look at the country of Bolivia. It's basically a big lithium lake. Even if it was, that's okay. We're going to use lithium in batteries for, what, another 5, 10 years? Then we will get to the next thing, and then the next thing after that. I've had that mentality. I've had that scarcity mindset. I grappled with this for 40 years, and for the first 30, I made no progress. I made absolutely no progress.

The people listening to this, the money that you make today, how far removed are you from natural resource extraction? You sell campaigns to people who sell services to people who sell maybe goods. At some point, somebody makes something. As more time goes by, it's more about the experience, it's less about the extraction, we're layering more and more order and knowledge on top of the resources that we have. If those resources run low, the capitalist incentives are there to find better ways. The incentives are there to recycle.

I'm arguing against my younger self, and I see a lot of people still holding that attitude that I had as my younger self. I'll just come back to it. It's just everywhere you look around you, everyone, everything, not everything, inert things aren't striving to grow, they're actually tending towards high entropy, chaos, disorder, but living things and all these systems that are products of living things are trending towards low entropy, high order, more knowledge, better versions of themselves, growth. Everything is growing and striving. Everything meaningful is growing and striving. To look at our business and say we should not pursue growth is just a fundamental mistake.

David: You say specifically your business must grow or it will die. Somebody's listening to this, it comes out on a Wednesday morning, somebody's listening to it on their Wednesday run or drive to work or something. How do you want their day to be different? How do you want this to impact somebody listening to this?

Blair: I want them to embrace what they feel deep down inside themselves, and that is to pursue the striving. A growing business often over the long run will become more profitable. It will generate more revenue. It should generate more profit. It might generate more headcount. You can limit any of those things if you want, but don't mistake the map for the territory. Grow, strive, create a culture. We've talked about this before.

You and I both like to bring up David Meister's post, The Problem of Standards, where he basically says there's two teams you can belong to, one where we're all getting along, we're one big happy family and standards are not enforced, and the other one where if you can't keep up, you can't stay. We can call that a tolerant culture and an intolerant culture, and you and I on that domain are fans of an intolerant culture.

What Meister says is there's no right or wrong answer. Then he says you have to choose what macro culture you want, tolerant or intolerant. He says there's no right or wrong answer. Then he says, but if you choose a tolerant culture, I can prove to you your lives will be miserable. I allude to this without citing Meister specifically. I allude to this in The Post. If you create a culture in your firm where it's like everybody's going to be okay no matter what they do, nobody can get fired, we're not enforcing any standards, and we are not striving, pushing ourselves and pushing each other, your life will become miserable. If your firm quits growing in the way that I'm talking about, you will become a magnet for stagnant people. They will bore you, they will demoralize you, they will bankrupt you.

David: Here's exactly what you said. You said your best people. Now, that best word is carrying a lot of water right there. Your best people want to work in an organization that is striving. If you opt out of growth, you will become a magnet for others who have also opted out, and they will demoralize, depress, and ultimately bankrupt you. That's not going to be a Hallmark card.

[laughter]

Blair: Maybe it's a Blair mark card.

David: All of us probably have had a job like that where we got a steady paycheck. There was no question of that. It was very stable, but nobody was reaching, and we felt like we weren't on a team that was exciting and fun and a little bit dangerous. There's some downsides to this too. I kept thinking of mowing the lawn. It's like as soon as I'm done mowing the lawn, well, the grass is already starting to grow again. One of the things you say is the prize for solving any problem is a ticket to the next problem because the striving that you're talking about here is really a series of solving lots of problems with curiosity and excitement, and your reward for doing that is just another one. [chuckles] I thought that was pretty funny.

Blair: I had a few different things that inspired me to speak to that. I think we live in the era of social media. I think there's a younger generation that people are putting their perfect lives out there on Instagram.

David: The van life.

Blair: Yes, and hiding all the warts. I think it's sending a message that life should be easy and fun and without struggle and without problems. Then when these people look at the world and see the problems in the world, they can become pretty defeated by it all. My point here is this is what you signed up for on this journey, on this life, is it is nothing but a series of problems. Like I said in The Post, your reward for solving the problem in front of you is the problem behind it that was brought into existence by you solving the problem. That is the rest of your life. That is the rest of your business. That is the rest of the political economy, the country, the world. To look at the problems and be defeated and say, okay, the problems will go away if we stop striving, yes, well, so will you. [chuckles]

David: Yes.

Blair: I had this realization a few years ago when it was like, oh, this is nothing more than a series of problems. This happened on Friday. I solved the problem in my business. It's like, bang, oh, this is perfect. Then out of that, having a conversation with a team member, holy shit, here's a whole new problem that I could not see, that did not exist until I solved the problem upstream from it. Now, I can choose to become demoralized by that. I can curse and swear and all of these things, or I can just chuckle quietly to myself and go, well, here we go again. Now, head down, solve this problem. Do you think you're going to solve the problem in front of you and then you're problem-free? That's not the way anything works.

David: I want to draw a distinction there about that solving problems, because what discourages me is having to solve the same problem over and over again. I don't mind solving problems, but I want them to be new problems.

Blair: Yes. That's a bugbear of mine. I don't want people in my team who take comfort in solving the same problem every day. You're not striving, you're not growing. You solve that problem, automate it, make it go away. It's human nature. Most people, especially when they're in an employee role, they think, well, if I make this problem go away, I'm going to lose my job. In my business, you lose your job if you don't make that problem go away, because I want you to work on the next problem. I can't see the next problem. Trust me, solve this problem. There will be another problem.

David: That's your reward.

Blair: Yes. That's what we all signed up for.

David: This is dangerous territory, this question I'm going to ask next.

Blair: Good.

David: It feels like you put your finger on a distinction between the Western world and the non-Western world. How do you think a Buddhist would listen to this episode and react to it?

Blair: Good question.

David: Haven't you just described the difference between the Western world and this striving? I don't know. That's probably a dangerous question to ask. I don't know what the answer is, but I think it's a legitimate question to ask, because there's a difference. There's a reaching, there's a desire for growth, there's never satisfied. That's a part of the Western world.

Blair: It is a part of the Western world, but it's a part of the Eastern world, too. What I would suggest is the Western world is more focused on the metrics of growth, and the Eastern world is more focused on growth.

David: What does that mean in real life?

Blair: Striving, acquiring more things, more head count, earning more money, making the stock price go up, as opposed to growing spiritually, growing in your ideas, growing in your relationships.

David: Right, because I don't want to delegitimize those last examples you just gave. Those strike me as just as important as examples of healthy growth, even just curiosity. I keep thinking back to that conversation we had. That's what keeps both of us alive, is curiosity. I just did a bunch of that this weekend, stuff I'd never done before, and I just had so much fun learning. Yes, there's a lot to think about here. I don't want to just make broad statements about the Western world. I just was curious about that.

Blair: Talking about different cultures, earlier this year, I was doing a speech on one of my pet topics, the inefficiency problem, in a country that 50 years ago was communist. Fairly young audience, and at the end of the talk, I'm taking some questions, and somebody said, "Are you sure the pursuit of efficiencies is the problem that kills innovation and it's not capitalism? Don't you think capitalism is the problem?"

I tried to temper my response. I was a slightly more impassioned response that, no, I don't think capitalism is the problem. I think capitalism is effectively the solution. Then I used the metaphor, which I think I've spoken about before. I see capitalism as it's the wood stove in my living room. The fire is trade, and the box that contains it and makes it safe and still allows for heat is the laws. Judicial and social laws that contain the trade. I said, the solution isn't to not have a fire in my house.

Then afterwards, I was thinking, the young person who asked the question, I thought, go home and ask your grandmother how life in this country was when there was no capitalism. Ask her if she thinks that the solution is to go back there.

David: Yes. When I think across, I'm in the US, you're in Canada, and I think there's a fairly large contingent of the population that's really not striving and reaching and trying and growing, but complaining about other people doing that.

Blair: There might be something culturally that's just shifting that's creating that, but it's probably more likely that there is something about the box that surrounds the fire. People are saying, get rid of the fire. I think the solution, and it's probably the way your current government is currently going, is like, no, the box is too strong, make the box less strong.

I've written elsewhere like, we're never going to agree on what the shape of the box should be, but that's just a problem that we have to keep working on, and we can't lose hope. We can't become dejected because this is a problem that never goes away. You and I did what I thought was a great episode on the subject of tension, and you made the excellent point, I've quoted you many times since then, that not all tension is bad. Some tension is required to, for example, to hold up a bridge.

To mix metaphors here, like what should the shape and the strength of that box be that contains the fire that is trade? That will reside in tension somewhere between people trying to pull it in two different directions. It's always moving slowly in one direction or another, but that's the conversation that we need to have, we're having, we need to keep having it, and we need to keep our composure as we have this conversation, and recognize that if the box moves a little bit in the other direction, the people pulling the other way aren't evil. This is part of the problem that we signed up for, so let's just keep working on the problem. Let's not lose hope, and let's not think that we're going to get to a world where we have no problems. That happens when you die.

David: Yes. The drive for growth is perhaps the most fundamental force in the universe, and the reward you get for solving one problem is to solve the next one. [chuckles]

Blair: Problems are the frontier of your growth. No problems, no growth.

David: Well, this has been very fascinating. It's probably wandered everywhere for people, but it's been great. You and I forgot we had an audience here, I think.

Blair: Yes. Well, thanks for letting me get a little bit philosophical. I don't think people come to my writing for that philosophy, but I like to sneak some in from time to time, and it's nice to be able to talk about it a little bit openly here.

David: Yes. Speaking of which, the other article you wrote that is also very philosophical and engendered quite a bit of response was called Attending the Way, so if you've enjoyed this discussion, make sure you look up that article too. Thank you, Blair.

Blair: Thanks, David.