Some time ago, I read the book Barbarians to Bureaucrats by Lawrence M. Miller that was written in the late 1980s. The book documented the life cycle of a corporation. After internalizing the message, I updated the model to reflect how a small business might evolve and attempted to summarize the message into the following small business evolution cycle.
Most business cultures follow a rather predictable path as the business progresses and grows. In addition to the business culture, the role of a business leader must also develop or the business gets stuck.
