Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Growth into new market segments drives business success – until it doesn't. As business school professors who also coach, train, and consult for executives, we noticed puzzling patterns in growth-related corporate disasters. The firms grew profitably for years using standard decision-making frameworks. But the same frameworks created ethical blindness when the firms moved from familiar customer segments into unfamiliar ones, causing serious harm to millions of new customers. To help managers, we identified critical red flags that signal when growth strategies risk causing societal harm and developed three practical tools that have proven effective in our workshops. Our experience shows that standard growth frameworks excel at identifying opportunities but fail to account for ethical risks when products safe for one segment become dangerous for another. Ignoring these warnings doesn't just hurt customers – it destroys billions in shareholder value.
Authors: Gaurab Bhardwaj, Amanda Weirup
Institution: Babson College
Language: English
Subfield: Information Systems and Management
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4414325653