Success Quote by Michael Eisner

Eisner’s line has the clipped authority of someone who ran companies where stasis isn’t neutrality; it’s a slow-motion headline. “If it’s not growing, it’s going to die” isn’t a folksy motivational poster so much as a CEO’s worldview boiled down to a threat: keep expanding or start preparing the obituary.

The intent is managerial clarity. Growth becomes the simplest metric that can discipline thousands of decisions across a sprawling organization. Under Eisner at Disney, “growth” didn’t just mean higher quarterly numbers; it meant new pipelines of attention and new forms of distribution. The subtext is that entertainment is an arms race: audiences drift, tastes mutate, technology rewires habits, and competitors are always a click away. In that environment, “good enough” is indistinguishable from “already outdated.”

But the sentence also reveals the ideology beneath late-20th-century corporate America: survival is framed not as stewardship, craftsmanship, or stability, but as perpetual expansion. That framing quietly turns creative work into a treadmill. If the company must always grow, it must always extract more value from its characters, its staff, its IP, its parks, its cable channels - everything becomes expandable inventory. The line sells urgency while naturalizing a kind of institutional restlessness.

Context matters here because Eisner’s tenure embodied the promise and the cost. Disney’s aggressive growth strategy produced hits and a revived brand, but it also fed tensions over creative control and short-term performance pressures. The genius of the quote is its brutal simplicity: it’s memorable because it collapses complexity into a binary. The danger is that it can make “living” look exactly like “getting bigger,” until the difference is only visible in hindsight.