Since it was first published in 1986, Growing Pains has become a classic resource for understanding how start-ups can make the transition to become large, professionally-managed organizations that maintain the special spark that launched them. In the fourth edition of Growing Pains, authors Eric Flamholtz and Yvonne Randle have thoroughly revised and updated the book to include new ideas and concepts including information about strategic planning, Sarbanes-Oxley, family businesses, and overcoming growing pains, as well as new examples and cases of companies.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Growing Pains : Transitioning from an Entrepreneurship to a Professionally Managed Firm
Comment: 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.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Textbookish but useful
Comment: 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.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: A High-level Roadmap for Building a "Professional" Business
Comment: 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.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: A Must Read...
Comment: 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!

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Thin on ideas, long on text
Comment: 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!

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