How to grow nowhere

If you’re going to run your business like a rental car, at least admit it.

There’s a certain kind of company that doesn’t have a strategy. It has an exit. And if you work in IT for one of these outfits, you already know it in your bones before you ever see it in a slide deck — you can smell it in the server room, in the duct-taped UPS, in the fact that “next year’s budget” has been a rumor since the Obama administration.

I’ve spent close to 30 years in infrastructure, everywhere from healthcare to higher ed, and I’ve learned to recognize the species. So consider this your field guide — part warning label, part mirror, and part instruction manual on how to stop being the punchline.

But diagnosis isn’t the point. Buried in each of these five steps is a fork — a specific, ordinary technology decision where one path optimizes for the next quarter and the other optimizes for whoever inherits the org chart after you’re gone. Growing Nowhere isn’t a personality flaw. It’s a series of small choices, made by name, that you can learn to make differently.

Step 1: Confuse “harvesting” with “growing”

The first rule of Growing Nowhere is that growth was never the plan. The plan was to make the numbers look good enough, long enough, to sell — to a private equity shop, a strategic acquirer, whoever’s buying this quarter. Everything downstream of that decision follows a certain logic, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

You’ll know you’re in one of these shops when the org chart hasn’t changed in five years but the balance sheet keeps “improving.” When the answer to almost any request is “let’s revisit that next quarter” — a phrase that, translated honestly, means never, but I don’t want the argument today. That’s not efficiency. That’s a company being slowly deboned for parts while still walking around, and everyone in the building can feel it.

The fork:  Growing-nowhere leadership defers the capital purchase and calls it discipline. The alternative isn’t recklessness — it’s a standing replacement schedule for the systems that actually carry risk, defended out loud even when the budget conversation gets uncomfortable. If you can’t name the year your core infrastructure ages out, you don’t have a plan. You have a countdown nobody’s watching.

Step 2: Make IT the company butler

In a business built to be sold, IT isn’t a capability. It’s a cost line that also happens to know how to fix the CFO’s iPhone.

I say this from experience, not observation. At one company, I held the CIO title — strategy, infrastructure, security, all of it — and I was also, on a fairly regular rotation, the person re-adding the CEO’s wife’s email account to her iPhone after it mysteriously stopped syncing. Again. Nobody voted on that. It just accreted, the way these things do, until “personal device support for the founder’s family” was quietly part of my actual job description, right underneath “protect the company’s data.”

That’s the tell. Somewhere along the way, “IT support” started meaning tech support for the C-suite’s personal devices. That’s not a technology strategy. That’s a Geek Squad with a badge and a benefits package — and nobody budgeted for the tip.

The fork: The problem was never that leadership occasionally needed help with a phone. It’s that nobody ever wrote down what IT is actually for. Leaders building beyond their own tenure scope the department’s mandate deliberately — in writing, revisited on purpose — and defend that boundary when convenience starts eating into capacity. Skip that step, and the job description grows by accretion until nobody in the building, including you, remembers what it was supposed to protect.

Step 3: Master the ancient art of zombie hardware

Every company Growing Nowhere develops the same superstition: capital expenditure is dangerous, but operating expense is basically free, because nobody looks at it too closely. So instead of replacing anything, you resurrect it. Repeatedly.

I worked with a system once — I’ll leave the company out of it — that ran 24×7 and kept growing, data-wise, faster than anyone was willing to fund protecting it. Eventually we crossed a line that should terrify anyone who understands backups: a full day’s worth of changes took longer than a day to back up. The system was outrunning its own safety net in real time, and the response wasn’t “let’s fix this,” it was “let’s see how long it holds.”

Here’s what doesn’t make it into the postmortem: the people keeping that system alive weren’t slacking. They wanted it to work as badly as anyone in the building. Every patch, every 2 a.m. resurrection, was someone doing genuinely good work with nothing to work with — while quietly running the math on what happens the day the thing that’s been revived six times doesn’t come back a seventh. In a company built to be sold, that’s not a hypothetical. That server dying and their job dying can be the same event, and they know it every time they log in.

The fork: Zombie hardware survives on borrowed time for a specific reason: the knowledge required to replace it safely lives in exactly one skull. Leaders building beyond their own tenure treat documentation and cross-training as succession infrastructure, not paperwork — the thing that actually determines whether a system, and the department around it, outlives the person who built it. Skip it, and every retirement becomes a small disaster with a two-year lead time nobody used.

Step 4: Bring in consultants who know how to cut, not how to build

Eventually, someone above your pay grade decides the real problem is that the numbers aren’t good enough yet, and the fix is outside help. Not the kind that improves anything — the kind that’s very good at finding what to remove.

I’ve sat across the table from consultants like this. They don’t ask “what does this organization need to succeed.” They ask “what’s the smallest number we can get away with.” The tell is simple: does the engagement start with “show me your roadmap,” or “show me your headcount”? You’ll know the report’s already written before the interviews start, because the recommendations somehow always land within five percent of the number leadership mentioned in the kickoff meeting.

The fork: Whether an engagement opens with “show me your roadmap” or “show me your headcount” isn’t something that happens to a leader — it’s a term they set before the contract is signed. Leaders building beyond their own tenure hire consultants to pressure-test a plan they already believe in. Leaders growing nowhere hire them to launder a number leadership already picked, then act surprised when the report agrees with the mandate.

Step 5 (The only real one): Learn the difference between cost and value, and say it out loud

Here’s the part where I stop being snarky, because this is the part that actually matters.

Every line item in IT has two numbers attached to it: what it costs, and what it’s worth. Companies built to be sold only ever look at the first number. If you’re the technologist inside one of these organizations, your job isn’t just to keep the zombie servers alive. It’s to keep translating cost into value, over and over, until someone above you starts hearing it. That means:

• Stop reporting uptime. Start reporting exposure. “The system was up 99.2% of the time” means nothing to a CFO. “We are one failed drive away from losing three weeks of billing data” gets read.
• Put a dollar figure on the workaround, not just the outage. The real cost of aging infrastructure isn’t the failure — it’s the hundred small inefficiencies your team absorbs every week, so nobody upstream notices the failure hasn’t happened yet.
• Make “cheap now” show its homework. Every deferred capital purchase has a shadow price — extra labor, extra risk, extra fragility. Ask, in writing, what the plan is for years two and three. Silence is an answer.
• Refuse to be the department of no, and refuse to be the department of yes-sir. The useful version of IT sits in the middle: partner enough to be trusted, blunt enough to be believed.
• Hire and promote for who’ll still be here in five years, and hand them real authority now. Staffing for the next quarter is how an organization ends up rebuilding institutional knowledge from scratch every eighteen months — and calling the rebuild “agility.”

The fork: This is the fork underneath all the others: who you build your bench around. Leaders growing nowhere staff for the next quarter’s headcount number. Leaders thinking past their own tenure staff — and promote, and delegate real authority to — the people who’ll still be answering for the decision in five years, whether or not the person who made it is still in the building.

None of this guarantees the company changes course. Some organizations really are built to be sold, and no amount of well-argued value is going to out-compete a payout. But the technologists who keep making the cost/value case — clearly, consistently, without theatrics — are the ones who end up with real influence when it counts, and real options when it’s time to leave.

Growing Nowhere is a choice leadership makes, one small technology decision at a time — and Growing Somewhere is the same thing, just with the fork taken the other way. The people keeping the lights on didn’t make that choice, and they shouldn’t have to pay for it — but too often, they’re the ones left holding the bill when the thing they kept alive finally can’t be revived again. It doesn’t have to be a choice you make with them. It also doesn’t have to be a choice they pay for alone. And it starts well before you’re gone — with whether the decisions you’re making today are ones the next person in the chair would thank you for.