Growth and development
Companies measure growth. They count size and call it progress. But growth is size and development is capacity, and the two are unrelated. A cemetery grows without developing. A scientist develops without growing. You can have one without the other, and much of the market confuses them daily.
Growth is more: more headcount, more revenue, more tools, more inventory. Development is something else entirely. It is the ability and the desire to satisfy your own needs and the needs of others. A capacity. A competence. Not a pile of things you own.
A cemetery grows without developing. A scientist develops without growing.
The test
Here is the test. Take two people with the same resources. The one who can do more with them is the more developed. Development is not a matter of how much you have. It is a matter of how much you can do with whatever you have.
The model is Robinson Crusoe, not Getty. Getty had everything. Crusoe had nothing but his own capability and what the island gave him, and he built a life from it. The more developed you are, the less you depend on resources, because you make resources out of what is already in front of you.
Not how much you have. How much you can do with whatever you have.
Standard vs. quality of life
This is why standard of living tells you little. Fly refrigerators, mobile phones, and televisions into a community that lived without them and you raise their standard of living overnight. You develop no one. They have more. They can do no more.
Quality of life is the indicator. Capacity is the thing.
Learning, not earning
And capacity cannot be handed over. Development is learning, not earning. No one develops another person. A teacher cannot learn the subject for you. The most a partner can do is encourage and facilitate. The work stays with the one doing the developing.
A teacher cannot learn the subject for you.
What good work looks like
This reframes what good work looks like. A deck is output. A workflow is output. An automation is output. Deliver enough of them and the client grows, while the client stays exactly as able as before. Worse: each output that substitutes for capacity erodes the capacity the business runs on.
The work worth doing raises what the client can do with what they already have. Same resources, more capability. That is development, and it is the kind of help that keeps paying out after you leave.
The client gets bigger and more dependent at the same time.
The question
So the question to put to any engagement, any initiative, any year of effort is short. Did this increase size, or increase capacity?
If the honest answer is size, it grew.
If the answer is capacity, it developed.
Size you can buy. Capacity you have to build. And in the long run, capacity is the only one still working for you after the engagement ends.