GROWTH is what businesses and even countries want to achieve at all cost. Many companies struggle to grow but others do. While growth is great news for a company, managing it remains a challenge.

Growth is change and managing change is never easy. Unfortunately, change inside an organisation is compounded by outside changes.

Not only does growth brings change, it also attracts competitors, regulators and customers with different expectations. Merson explains how different parts of a business evolve at different speeds and the complexity of growth from one region to another.

An established business operating in one country, which invests in a small venture in another, for example, needs to acknowledge not just the legal and cultural differences between the two countries, but also the differences between managing a large corporate business and a small entrepreneurial firms.

Businesses, Merson adds, which anti-cipate and manage the challenges of growth give themselves the best chance of ensuring growth is secure and sustainable.

He uses Larry Greiners, professor of management and organisation at Marshall School of Business, description of growth in five phases, which can be identical to what businesses go through in South Africa. The first phase is that of creativity.

Here the founder's energies are consumed by doing rather than managing. Decisions are taken quickly and reactively.

Then there's direction where management systems and processes are introduced and the running of the business becomes formal.

Delegation is where there is formation of a more decentralised structure and executives manage by exception and junior managers have budget and profit responsibility for divisions and departments.

The fourth is coordination in which senior managers use formal systems. Some functions are centralised, capital expenditure is carefully controlled, formal planning processes are established and company bonus schemes may be used.

Finally there is collaboration, in which teamwork, social control and self-discipline replace "formal control". The focus shifts from process to problem solving, and from headquarters to interdisciplinary teams.

If you have just started a new company, this is the book for you.

The book gives insight on systems that need to be in place long before the company becomes a multinational conglomerate.

It can even assist managers who get promoted and have to manage more people and deal with bigger budgets.