The proposition that growth itself creates value is so deeply entrenched in the rhetoric of business that it has become an article of almost unquestioned faith that growth is a good thing. CEO Avery’s description of his problem (“The company’s growth had slowed down in the 1980s”) and his goals (“We want to grow bigger … a worldwide foundation for continued international growth”) are little more than the repetition of the word “growth”—magical invocations of the name of the object of desire.
