"If it's not growing, it's going to die"
About this Quote
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 In that environment, “good enough” is indistinguishable from “already outdated.”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.
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 In that environment, “good enough” is indistinguishable from “already outdated.”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.
Quote Details
| Topic | Business |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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