You are better off being in the 60th percentile at a high-growth company than in the 99th percentile in a low-growth environment. When a company is growing fast, opportunity comes to you. When it’s not, you spend time trying to force it.
Early in my career, I worked for Procter & Gamble. It was a great company with talented leaders, but it wasn’t growing. I worked hard and earned strong feedback, but advancement was measured in decades and it was nearly impossible to contribute to the top or bottom line.
Working for a well-run, large company like that is a great way to develop management best practices. It is also the best way to learn how to run and operate a great company.
However, large, low-growth companies have far fewer problems and opportunities than high-growth companies. So, it doesn’t really matter how good you are; if opportunities and problems are scarce, you can’t produce much impact.
Despite everyone’s good intentions, advancement is slow, and the system rewards those who have the right relationships, not those who are driving outcomes (because there are fewer outcomes to be driven).
Scott Galloway once said that people unknowingly stack the odds against themselves by staying in low-growth environments. This is what I was doing at the beginning of my career.
Moving to Seattle and joining a fast-growing e-commerce company (Amazon) was the best career move I could have made. It was an early-stage, high-growth company— problems and opportunities were everywhere!
One of our biggest problems was deciding which problems and opportunities to tackle first and finding capable leaders to own them. If you focused on the right ones and executed well, big, meaningful results followed.
At Amazon, in the Seattle HQ, I was in an environment where I had the opportunity to deliver big results. It required working hard and smart, but delivering results that could lead to rapid promotion was possible. It also meant that promotions were as apolitical as you could ask for in a large company because your results could be measured objectively.
I experienced what Scott Galloway points out— you can stack the odds in your favor for career growth by orienting your career around industries, cities, and companies that are fast growing.
If you find an opportunity to join a fast-growing company, in a high-growth sector in a growing city, take it.
