I have to say, the title is very descriptive. The perception of a business needing to grow exponentially in order to succeed is just that, a perception.
While I found the book to be slightly repetitive and it covered the same ground multiple times and kept repeating the same overarching points a couple times and restating what has already been said in previous chapters and… well, you get the point. This book could have been half the weight but still carried the same punch. Once I got past that issue, Jarvis is decent writer. But, like my views of Seth Godin, his writing is more geared to a blog style format than a full-length book.
There. I got my quibble out of the way.
The remainder of the book was insightful as it laid out the many ways a business fails by trying to grow to quickly: investing in and focusing on potential customers rather than investing in and focusing on current customers, being myopic when it comes to viewing growth as the only viable answer to business problems, giving up ownership of a company unnecessarily to VC/PE/angel investors, etc. In short, growth as a business strategy needs to be carefully examined before embarking on that particular path as it often becomes a solution looking for an ever-bigger solution. And at a certain point, that strategy can get crunchy.
Here’s the WorldCat link for the title: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1086338038 Go find it in a library near you.