When Growth Stalls

I am in no way a fundamental analyst – in fact as a skill set for investing I regard it as irrelevant and an example of being seduced by your own narrative fallacy. However, I am in business and I am intrigued as to why some businesses stall, whither and die. I came across the graphic below from a Harvard Business Review article that looks at why businesses stall after periods of growth.

The graphic shows that once growth stalls it is impossible to recover and this seems logical because from a physical standpoint once the energy has gone out of a system the system collapses. So if your own business stalls and ceases to be vibrant then it seems to be part of a death spiral that is hard to escape. Think of this in terms of activities outside of business such as getting fit or losing weight. Everyone starts with a bang or period of growth and then progress slows or plateaus and moving away from this plateau is extremely hard and requires a redoubling of effort. It would seem from a business perspective that this redoubling of effort is extremely hard.

The article then goes on to try and identify causes for this loss of momentum. However, this proved to be more problematic as show by the graphic below.